


red ribbon winner

by heavyliesthecrown



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Christmas, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fluff, Holidays, Winter, a very merry screwball comedy romcom hallmark christmas movie, an array of winter tropes, bed sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-09-16 14:45:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16955964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavyliesthecrown/pseuds/heavyliesthecrown
Summary: On a night when everything goes wrong, meeting him is at the top of her list. If she had it her way, she’d have as little to do with him as possible. (Un)luckily for her, she rarely gets her way.Or – the magical, transformative power of a very ugly sweater.





	1. Saturday #1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to bugggghead for lending her eyes and beta'ing this chapter!
> 
> From the prompt: your car slid into a snowbank and i’m the mechanic that comes to tow you.
> 
> Tumblr - @heavy-lies-the-crown

 

She’ll be the first to admit that she’s not a good driver.

She gets nervous easily. Thirty miles per hour feels like nothing in the back of an Uber, but it may as well be flying when she’s behind the wheel. And even more so when it’s dark and snowing out.

After a smattering of elongated _‘no’s’_ and _‘why me’s’,_ a few minutes of pouting and banging her fists against the wheel pathetically, she draws in a deep breath and picks up her phone.

And after four tries, she gets him.

“Archie?” she says, leaning forward when she hears the line click. “Arch?”

“Whassit, Betty?”

 _He sounds drunk_ , she thinks. “I crashed into a snowbank.”

“Wha’?”

 _He’s drunk._ “I crashed into a snowbank. Can you send someone to get me?”

“Wha’?” Archie repeats. “Who’s at the bank?”

“I need someone to pick me up!” she yells. “I’m near the Riverdale exit.”

“Oh,” Archie slurs, in a tone she’s not confident in at all. “Yeah. That’s – yeah. I’m coming. I’m on my way right-”

“No, not you!” she says. “Go find someone else.”

After another three rounds of back and forth, Archie says that he will. And so she waits.

 

 

 

When an hour passes, and no one shows up, Betty calls triple-A like she should’ve done at the very beginning.

Betty wishes she’d stayed home like she’d wanted to. She wishes she’d been able to make it home for Archie’s birthday this year so she could’ve had some excuse for not going to his Christmas party now. She wishes that she’d gone with her instinct and just taken a train instead of trying to do the right thing by using her fifty bucks in Zipcar credit.

But she’d figured that after her last Zipcar experience, the one that had been so wonderfully tainted with literal dog shit in the middle of the back seat, she owed it to herself to stick it to them, even if she is the world’s worst driver.

When she sees floodlights round the corner, growing steadily brighter as they draw closer to her, Betty pushes her car door open and steps out into the cold, waving her arms in its direction.

She doesn’t know why she does that. She knows that in all likelihood, they can see her just fine.

“I saw you,” the man tells her plainly, voice slightly muffled over the slam of his door.

She loves being right.

“I was just making sure.”

“This is you?” he asks, crouching as he examines her car. She might be seeing things – it’s dark and it’s cold and she’s tired – but she thinks she sees something of a mocking smirk on his face.

_How dare he judge her and her terrible driving skills._

“It would seem, wouldn’t it?”

“What happened?”

Betty shrugs, hoping that it helps at least in some way with her nonchalance. “I swerved,” she says. “There was a deer in the middle of the road.”

At that, he narrows his eyes at her. “In the _middle_ of the road?”

“Right there.”

“You know, you don’t hear of many deer around these parts.”

She’s going to submit the complaint of her lifetime about this yahoo when she gets to warmth and WiFi access. “You weren’t there.”

When he retreats back to the tow truck, shoulders hunched and hands stuffed into jacket pockets she doesn’t think is really appropriate for this weather, Betty chocks up a point to herself. She hadn’t been lying – there really was a deer in the road.

It just hadn’t really been close enough to her that she can justify the fact she’d crashed into the snowbank.

“Nice sweater,” he says when he returns to her and her rental, flashlight in hand. She can tell by his tone that he doesn’t mean that at all.

Luckily for her, he’s wearing perfectly good ammunition on his head, too. “Nice hat.”

“Isn’t it?” he says easily, crouching on his knees as he brings the light under her car. “Unique, right?”

A point for him.

As he mutters things to himself, things that she frankly doesn’t want to hear because she catches edges of phrases like _‘imaginary deer’_ and _‘lousy driver,’_ and it’ll all only serve to piss her off more, she jumps lightly in place, bouncing from one foot to the other to ward off the cold.

“Can I borrow your phone?” he asks, holding his hand out to her expectantly.

“What? No.”

“I need the light.”

“So? Use yours.”

“Can’t,” he says, with his head still tucked under her car as he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the exact phone she’d had in sixth grade, the one that she now knows as the Nokia brick.

She hadn’t even known those were still in service.

“Fine,” Betty relents, flicking her thumb up on her screen and turning on the light for him. The less he meddles with it, the better. Still, she crouches at his side, knees digging into the hard ground in protection of it, lest he start flipping through her photos.

Mostly of her cat, but they’re still private and personal and for her eyes only.

“You have to latch it,” Betty says, waving her hand in his general direction. It’s unhelpful in every way possible, because she knows he knows he has to latch it. “That part goes on that part.”

At that, he turns and looks at her, sideways in such a way she’s sure will have a crick settling in on his neck later. “I know that part goes on that part,” he tells her. “How do you know that part goes on that part?”

“I know cars,” Betty says, and even she’ll admit that she’d sounded a little prissier than she’d intended.  

“Just not how to drive them, apparently.”

 _“Excuse me?_ Where do you get off even thinking you have the right to-”

“Sorry,” he interrupts, and to his credit, he sounds it. “I’m sorry. That was out of line.”

Betty forgives him, but because she’s still salty and she’s very cold, she simply nods in his direction.

After a few more minutes with his head tucked under her car, she hears him sigh. “I still can’t see.” His neck cracks loudly as he rolls it from side to side.

She could argue with him and insist emphatically that he can and that he’s just not trying hard enough, or that he try this and that, but there’s no use.

As it is, she can’t see either, and it’ll just be much quicker this way.

“Here,” Betty says, and with a sigh, she reaches her hand to her back and flicks her thumb over the battery pack there, lighting up the two red reindeer noses positioned prominently on either breast.

She can see very clearly now, and what’s right in her line of sight is his face, flooded over in red, and doing its utmost to not bark out laughter in her face. _This guy,_ she thinks.

“How festive,” he says eventually, the corners of his mouth quirking and twitching as he does.

“It’s for an ugly sweater party.”

“Mmm.”

“I don’t normally dress like this.”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“I don’t.”

“Okay.”

“And before you judge it, I’ll have you know that it’s won competitions.”

He nods at her in what she knows is feigned seriousness. “How could it not?”

 

 

 

Her bright boobs do the trick.

“You can take it to the Riverdale garage,” she tells him. “It’s three blocks past Pop’s. It’s the diner with the big neon-”

“I know Pop’s,” he says. Then, almost shyly - “need a ride?”

At that, she looks around the empty road before shaking her head. “My friends are coming.”

 _To Archie’s front door when she rings it upwards of fourteen times after she’s trekked her way there in the cold by herself,_ her mind finishes.

“Tell them to watch out for the scary deer in the middle of the road when they do.”

 _This guy,_ she thinks again. “I sure will,” Betty says brightly.

He’s one foot into the tow when she decides that her pride really isn’t worth walking through the night.

Because he’d been right about one thing, although she’ll never tell him this – that she is scared of the deer, and it’s crossed her mind more than once that it just might make a reappearance at some point and come charging at her, sending her and her award-winning sweater flying in the air.

So she jogs to catch up and hops into the front seat as he’s turning the ignition.

“I’m cold,” Betty says by way of explanation when he looks at her with far too smug a face.

“Dasher and Dancer aren’t keeping you warm enough?” he asks, tipping his head towards her sweater before starting down the road.

 

 

 

“Tomorrow?” she asks, voice small as she looks around the garage. It still looks exactly the same to her. “Not, you know... tonight?”

“The battery guy’s in at nine, ma’am.”

“But it’s a rental,” Betty argues, hearing the sad deflation in her own voice as she speaks. “It’s supposed to be back in Manhattan in like, three hours.”

“Well, ma’am,” the mechanic tells her, “it’s not going to be.”

“I can fix it,” she says quickly, voice ticking up in hopefulness. “I know cars. I used to work here in high school. I’m Betty,” she offers, like that means anything at all. “Cooper. I used to live on Elm. I went to Riverdale High - go Bulldogs.”

 _No can do,_ she intuits from the man’s head-shake.

“I swear I know what I’m doing,” Betty tries again. “My dad’s a mechanic. I’ve built cars before, literally from scratch. And,” she says as she reaches into her jacket pocket, fumbling through her gloves and chapstick for her wallet, “I also have this... Christmas present for you. Twenty-three, no, _four_ dollars. Twenty-four dollars.”

But when the mechanic looks at her, arms crossed and with a tired, heaving sigh, she tucks the wad of crumpled bills back into her wallet with her head turned down in shame. She’s not someone who normally does things like this. That hadn’t been a display of her best self.

“I’ll see you at nine,” Betty says.

She knows when she’s been defeated, and right now is one of those times.

“Wow.”

Betty jumps at the voice behind her, turning on her heel at the sound.

Triple-A. She’d forgotten he was there.

“Don’t.”

“What? I can’t believe he didn’t take it,” he teases. “Bribes have that way of ringing in the spirit of the season and all that, you know? What a Scrooge.”

“Please stop now.”

 _“I_ thought it was a generous gift,” he continues. “If you wanted to give it to me, I’d be more than happy to take it from you.”

“Great!” she chirps brightly. “And after that, I can show you right where you can shove it.”

 _Point Betty,_ she thinks triumphantly.

 

 

 

Betty rides with him in silence, pressed right up against the truck’s door. She could’ve walked - Archie’s house isn’t that far from the garage - but there’s something coming down outside, some horrible, miserable mix of snow and rain falling sideways that turns her off the idea.

And, it’s an irrational thought, but there’s a part of her mind that jumps to the what if, too - the one that goes something like _what if this rain-slash-snow hits the sweater’s battery pack in exactly the right way, and sends her up in flames?_

“Which house?” he asks her, leaning forward over the wheel as he squints and peers down the block.

 _It’s a stupid question,_ Betty thinks, _because there’s only one house on this Stepfordian street that has the lights on._

And that has bad music playing, and a gaggle of shirtless men on the front porch.

“The obvious one.”

He smiles over at her, slyly and a little knowingly, but Betty doesn’t think much of it. She figures it’s just the way he is, whatever that may be. “Just checking,” he says, pulling up in front of the little yellow house she still remembers so well.

“Thank you for the ride,” Betty says. She doesn’t want to because she thinks this guy has been having a grand old time at her expense since minute-one, but she’s been raised to be polite. “I’d say this was pleasant, but it wasn’t.”

And then, there are the times when she just can’t help herself.

Betty is halfway up the porch steps when she hears his annoying voice again. “Have fun!” he calls to her loudly, voice far too affected to be sincere.

She considers turning around and giving it right back to him - sticking out her tongue or throwing up a choice finger would work well here. But since she hadn’t taken the high road before, she decides to now and pushes the door to Archie’s house open instead without looking back.

She’s greeted with a wave of heat and it reminds her instantly of college and why she hates going out.

 _Not hates,_ Betty chastises herself as she pushes through the crowds - hating anything isn’t good. It’s negative energy she doesn’t need, and it’s bad juju.

Says Polly.

“Betty!” Archie calls as she shoves her way into the kitchen, holding his arms up high in the air. His shirt is off, but she can forgive him for that this time since it’s the equivalent of a sauna in this hell-house. “Bett-ee! Wha’ took so long?”

She throws on a smile as Archie charges at her, swooping her up in far too firm and too sweaty a hug. But she doesn’t mind, because she’s finally here.

 _That promised ride would’ve never come,_ she thinks when Archie places her back on the ground.

 

 

  

Betty allows herself to have a drink or five since she’s not going anywhere but Archie’s couch tonight. And by gin and tonic number six, she’s starting to think the party isn’t the worst thing in the world.

In fact, it’s kind of fun.

It’ll cost her a couple extra bucks in penance for her late return, but she’s spending time with Archie now, and that’s really what the holidays are all about.

Family and drunk friends. And since her family is scattered across the globe, drunk friends it is.

“I miss you,” Archie says, hiccuping once and loudly as he slings an arm over her shoulders. “I miss doing _this_ together.”

And while she does miss Archie - he’d been such a staple in her life, every day for eighteen years - she can’t say that she really misses house parties at the Andrews abode, even if she has been to her fair share of them just by virtue of being Archie’s friend.

“I miss this, too,” she says. It’s what Archie wants to hear, and it’s his Big Night - as a good friend, she should pay some deference to it. “Hey, remember that time we broke into the- _oh my god.”_

On instinct, Betty falls down in a crouch behind the island, tugging on Archie’s hand in an effort to get him to follow suit as she does. He’s twice her size and body weight, though and she really only manages to jerk slightly at his arm.

No matter. She’s protected behind here.

“Who is that?” Betty hisses up at him.

Archie’s eyes are completely glazed over. “Who?”

_Triple-A._

_“That guy,”_ she says, jabbing her finger in his direction. “With the hat.”

“Oh!” Archie says, face lighting up he realizes who she’s pointing at. “Hey man!”

“Arch _, no.”_

“Jughead!”

Triple-A turns before she has a chance to slap a hand over Archie’s fat mouth, looking a little more tired than he had when he’d dropped her off, but still as smug as ever.

 

 

 

“Jugg- _ay,”_ Archie greets, throwing his arms out wide with such enthusiasm that she has to jump back to avoid the slosh of his beer over his solo cup. “You made it!”

 _Jughead_ \- she wonders what in the world kind of name that is.

“Yeah,” Jughead says, stepping back a time or two from the flying momentum Archie barrels into him with. “I, uh - yeah; I made it. Thanks for the invite.  Some party.”

“You said you weren’t coming.”

She thinks she sees his face redden. “Did I say that?” Jughead asks, and Betty can tell from the high pitch his voice takes that he most certainly did.

“Is’ okay,” Archie says. “Is all good. Let’s find you some drinks - you look thirsty. Here!” Archie says, pushing a half-full bottle of Jack into Jughead’s hands. “Here. There’s some here. Les’ go find more.”

“You know, I think I’m set with this.”

“You sure?” Archie slurs, red head whipping from side to side wildly as he scans the room. “There’s more. There’s, like, _so_ _much_. There’s a keg in the ottoman - no, _on_ the ottoman. No, wait-”

 _“Next to_ the ottoman,” Betty hears herself saying.

She wishes she’d just kept her big mouth shut. Archie looks at her, first with confusion, like he’d forgotten she’d been standing right there, which frankly, she believes he just might’ve. Then, he looks at her with what she can only describe as pure, unbridled excitement.

“This,” Archie says proudly, gesturing to her with his solo cup in one hand while slapping the other down on Jughead’s shoulder. “This is my friend. Remember I told you about her? This is Betsy.”

“Betty,” she corrects flatly.

“Thas’ what I said. This is my friend Betsy. She likes books. And you like books-”

“Archie,” she interrupts sharply. She knows exactly where this is going and she’d rather Archie not arrive there. “Why don’t we just go over-”

“You guys can like books together!”

Then, Archie laughs to himself, a full on head-thrown-back, hooting laugh, and Betty thinks about how good it would feel to take that solo cup and dump its contents all over his head.

 

 

 

Were her car not stuck at the garage, she’d have left long ago.

It’s past midnight now, but it’s only gotten louder and rowdier since she’d arrived. Part of her wonders why the cops haven’t shown up yet since this is so not Elm Street’s idea of acceptable behavior, but the rest of her knows.

It’s because Archie Andrews is Riverdale’s darling, and he gets a pass every year to go a little nuts on his birthday and Christmas. That, and the fact that most of the Elm Street men are away on the annual Dads-of-Riverdale Bahamian cruise this week, anyway, including Fred and excluding her own dad; not that he lives here anymore.

Betty leans forward against the porch ledge and cranes her neck out in an effort to peek over at her old house. For all intents and purposes, it’s exactly the same - the same brick facade, same white siding, same red door.

She’s glad the new owners left that - she’s always loved that red door.

She pulls back abruptly, vision blocked, when someone stands right in her line of sight.

“Hi,” Jughead says, leaning up against the porch rail she’s resting her elbows on.

_I was looking that way, thank you very much._

“Hello,” Betty says primly, not quite able to bring her eyes to his. If she’s being honest, she’s still a little embarrassed she’d been rude to him earlier, not that he hadn’t deserved it.

“Having fun?”

She knows he means that at least a little mockingly because she’s standing out here on the porch alone, but joke’s on him because she is. “I am actually,” Betty says. “Taking in the sights. That’s my old house over there.”

“That one? Pretty,” he says leaning back over the ledge as he looks. “Do your parents still live there?”

“Nope,” Betty answers before taking a healthy swig from her solo cup. It’s been a while since she’s been in the presence of old red faithful. “They sold it when I left for college. But,” Betty continues, frowning as she hears her voice take on a hard tone she doesn’t intend for it to, “not before they got divorced and spent six months arguing every night over who would get the elliptical.”

“Oh,” he says slowly. Betty sighs - she’s made him uncomfortable. Her drunk mouth has the tendency to do that to people. “That, um - sucks. Sorry about that.”

“Ancient history.”

Seven years, but it’s probably only her that’s counting.

“Who ended up getting it?”

“The elliptical?”

“Mmm hmm.”

Betty laughs, if only because she’s never gotten that question before. “My mom,” she answers. “It’s in some storage unit now. She’s traipsing across Paris and trying to find her zen or love or whatever it is one finds there.”

He falls quiet then, leaning back again to look over at her house.

It was a good one, she thinks as she looks, too, big enough to grow in and still feel like she had her own space, and cozy - the keeper of fond childhood memories, and of so many late nights playing flashlight tag with Archie.

And, it’s also the place she’d caught her dad balls deep in Cheryl’s mom on the kitchen counter after Vixens practice one Wednesday afternoon.

“So back there,” he says, jerking his thumb in the direction of the front door, “were you hiding from me behind the island?”

_Yes._

“Of course not,” Betty says. “I dropped something.”

“Kind of looked like you were hiding.”

She doesn’t know what is it with him and his need to challenge everything she says. “Well, I wasn’t. But,” Betty says, “no one can blame me if I _were_ hiding. It’s not like I expected to see you here. I didn’t know you knew Archie.”

“I didn’t know _you_ knew Archie.”

“You didn’t guess?” Betty asks. “How many Christmas parties are there really in town tonight?”

“Hey, you said you were going to an _ugly sweater_ party. But maybe I just missed the memo.”

Betty feels her lip twist as she’s caught in her white lie.

“I can’t believe that _these_ are the friends you thought would pick you up from the road where the deer roam wild and free,” Jughead continues, looking around the porch. “Thank god for me.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do that enough for the both of us.”

He shrugs, smiling. “Ah, but how much is really enough?”

 _It’s kind of a nice smile,_ Betty thinks. _A little lopsided, and still a little smug, but overall a-_

She’s shaken from her train of thought when he pushes himself up from his lean against the ledge and starts down the porch steps.

“You going somewhere?” she asks. She doesn’t know why she’s curious, but she is.

“Pop’s.” He says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m hungry.”

“Oh. Cool.”

 _Cool?_ What a relic of a word.

At the bottom of the steps, he turns to her, eyebrows raised in the question.

“Are you?” he asks.

“Am I what?”

“Hungry.”

 _Not especially,_ she thinks as she starts down the steps. But it’s been a while since she’s had a good milkshake.

 

 

 

It’s been a strange hour. She’d been genuinely happy to see Pop, so much older than she remembers him in her mind’s eye, but still Pop, genuinely taken aback when she’d seen Jughead and the grandfather of her childhood exchange the warmest and friendliest of greetings, and genuinely floored when she’d watched him put away two full meals before ordering a third.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Betty knows she’s very jealous of this beanpole’s metabolism.

“So,” Betty begins when the silence becomes too palpable. “What did Archie tell you about me?”

To his credit, Jughead swallows before he answers, which is more than she can say for Archie sometimes. “That you like books.”

“No, seriously.”

“Seriously, that’s what he said. This is literally verbatim here - ‘you should meet my friend Betty, she likes books, too; I bet you’ll get along.’”

“Huh,” she says. “Well, don’t be too broken up about it. Archie’s always wrong about stuff.”

He isn’t, but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.

Jughead laughs, brushing off the salt from his fingertips. _Nice hands,_ she thinks. _Nice fingers._ “My turn. Was there really a deer in the road?”

The hand she has tucked under her chin falls loudly to the table. It’d be nice if she could get just _one_ of her white lies past him. _“Yes,”_ Betty says. Then quietly through a quick mumble- “just, you know, not in the _middle_ of the road. He was off to the side staring at me.”

His fingers drum against the table in triumph. “I knew it.”

“So, why triple-A?” Betty asks in an effort to move past the subject. She doesn’t love the fact that the reason she’s in this mess in the first place is because she was spooked by a far-away deer looking at her funny. “White-knight syndrome? Lover of bad customer service? Affinity for broken down cars?”

“Affinity for cash, maybe,” he says. “I moved here in September.”

“From where?”

“Toledo.”

“So you moved here all the way from Toledo so you could… work at Riverdale’s triple-A and make bank there?”

“The amount of judgment in your eyes is absolutely terrifying,” he says plainly. “I work at Riverdale High. I teach there. I just needed some extra cash to cushion the move. And for the holidays.”

“Let me guess,” Betty says, feeling a smile curve at her mouth as she does. “You’re the psych teacher. You manipulate young minds.”

“Nah.”

She can’t help the next one. “P.E.?”

“Mean,” Jughead says, but he’s smiling a little, so she figures he’s not too offended over the joke. As it is, she finds herself more attracted to men with his build, anyhow. Archie and his arms have never really done it for her.

Her lip twists in thought. “Math?”

“English,” he says. “9th grade. Books, remember?”

Betty feels herself gaping at him, but it’s really directed more to herself - it’s so obvious and she’s usually good at putting two and two together.

_It must be the alcohol._

“You?” he asks.

“I work for a publishing company,” Betty answers. “In the city.”

“Hence the books. What’s the deal with the sweater?”

“It’s ugly,” she says.

“Oh, I’m aware.”

“I bought it a few years ago,” Betty explains. “One of my friends – I don’t know if Archie’s ever mentioned her, but he might’ve since he has a big mouth - her name is Veronica and she’s a lot, and anyway. Unimportant. She throws an ugly sweater party every year, picks a winner, the usual. You’re looking at the 2016 winner right here. It’s custom-made, actually.”

“It’s _custom made?”_ he asks, leaning forward with his incredulity. “That’s a real job?”

Betty shrugs. “It’s an Etsy store.”

“Huh,” Jughead says slowly. “So if you can custom-make a sweater, why did you choose to do that?”

“To do what?”

“Dasher and Dancer,” he says, gesturing to his own chest in explanation.

Betty sips from her milkshake healthily when she feels her cheeks heat. “I like winning.”

“Shocker.”

She throws a pointed stare at his eye roll. So what if she likes winning? Winners win. Losers lose. Why be in the latter category when she can be in the former?

“It was the ugliest thing I could think of at the time. I just - I don’t know,” Betty hears herself saying. There goes her drunk mouth again. “I think people sometimes think I’m... prudish. Or stuck up. I guess I just wanted to show them that I can be fun.”

She’s fully expecting him to come back at her with some annoying quip about she’s a tried and true fun-sucker, or how could anyone ever dare think that she of all people could prudish, what, with her neat ponytail and love for the Peter Pan collar.

But he doesn’t. “Why wear it to Archie’s party?” Jughead asks instead, popping a fry into his mouth.

Betty shrugs. “I thought it’d be funny. And that it’d make a good conversation starter.”

“Mmm,” he hums. “And how’d that work out?”

_He walked right into this one._

“Not that well,” Betty faux-laments, voice dramatically dejected as she leans forward and catches her straw between her lips, “you started talking to me.”

That earns her a loud and hearty laugh.

  

 

 

The first sign that something is very wrong is when she turns back onto Elm and hears only quiet - very silent, and very scary quiet.

The second is when she sees the Andrews’ house, a ghost town of a place that she wouldn’t even know hosted debauchery just a couple hours ago, save for the handful of beer bottles still lined up on the porch.

“Oh, shit,” Betty says, jogging up to the house and wrestling with the doorknob while giving a few good slams with her palm onto the doorbell. “Shit.”

This door hasn’t been locked even after she’d walked in on Fred Andrews doing Jazzercise in the living room in what she can only generously describe as tiny speedos, so _of course,_ it’s locked now.

“No,” Betty moans again pathetically, crouching to look for the little potted plant that she remembers used to sit out on the porch housing the hideaway key, but even she remembers how that had disappeared about four summers ago after Archie had ralphed in it midway through his birthday bash.

And then rallied like nobody’s business.

“Oh dear,” she hears Jughead quip when he joins her on the porch. “What a bummer.”

And because she’s absolutely _had it_ , she rounds on him.

“You listen here, bubba,” Betty bites out, finger inches from his nose. Technically, this is kind of his fault. She wouldn’t have gone to Pop’s if he hadn’t suggested it. “I’m _up to here_ with this night, so if you even _think_ about saying one more word right now, I’ll… I’ll-”

“Yes?”

She doesn’t mean to do it, but it just comes naturally - she stomps her foot loudly and completely petulantly before barking out a frustrated yelp.

“Just go home,” Betty dismisses.

She isn’t even surprised he follows her, hot on her heels as she makes her way around the house to the kitchen door.

 

  

 

She begins to think that Archie might’ve done this to her on purpose when she finds the back door locked, too.

“This is bullshit,” Betty mutters, fingers instinctively rising to her face to pinch the bridge of her nose.

“Locked?”

“Why are you still here?”

“Entertainment value?”

She reminds herself that yelling at him again isn’t nice, and that one of her old neighbors could hear her being a bitch if she does.

Not that she cares.

But because she’s never been brought down by a locked door before, or a smarmy man, for that matter, she feels around her head for a bobby pin. She doesn’t have that many in tonight, but there’s one in there somewhere.

“Ah,” Betty says, tugging one out from near her neck.

“You’re picking the lock?”

It’s such an unobservant comment that she feels like it doesn’t even dignify a response.

 

 

  

She’s a little rusty at this. Picking a lock, Betty realizes very quickly, is not like riding a bike - it’s a skill that doesn’t come back to her as naturally as she’d hoped it would.

That, and her fingers are still a little less than dextrous from all the gin and tonics, too.

“Here,” Jughead says, crouching low next to her when she jiggles the doorknob again to no avail. “Let me try.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Clearly. It’s so great that you got the door open.”

She’d been considering letting the Triple-A review slide, but she’s rethinking that now. “You know your attitude isn’t helping anything,” Betty says. But she’s admittedly getting nowhere with this, so she hands him the bobby pin. “Don’t drop it.”

“I will if you keep breathing on me like that.”

“You’d better not,” Betty warns.

Still, she steps back for good measure.

 

 

 

He’s no better at this than she is. In fact, she thinks, with all his clunking around and loud jingling and jangling, that he’s far worse.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Betty says, intentionally bumping into him just a little as tries to get a better view of the lock. “It’s about the tumblers, you have to-”

“-just let me try my-”

“-done this before, I used to sneak back into my house all-”

“-fingers in the way-”

“-big head is blocking all the light so just-”

When the bobby pin catches and flips out of the lock, Betty barely ducks in time as it comes flying at her face.

In retrospect, though, having her face break the pin’s fall would’ve been a much better outcome than it landing where it does - somewhere unseen and buried in the snow.

  

 

  

 _“Great!”_ she yells, throwing her hands up in the air before letting them slap to her sides. “That’s just _great_. Well done. That was just - really, A+ work there, Houdini.”

 _“Me?_ How was that _my_ fault? I was trying to help. _Your_ fingers were the ones getting in the way!”

“I don’t know what it is about people and their need to _insert_ themselves into everything that - what’re you doing?”

“I’m calling Archie,” he says, bringing his artifact of a phone to his ear.

“And you think he’ll pick up? I rang the doorbell, like, fourteen times. He’s not going to hear his phone if he can’t hear the freaking bell.”

“You have a better idea?”

She, in fact, does.

 

 

 

If she’s being honest, it’s really Archie’s idea - she’s heard him brag about doing this a handful of times before. Betty doesn’t know if she’s truly believed him up until now, but as she surveys the front exterior of the Andrews house, she thinks that it doesn’t look that unachievable.

The porch roof isn’t really _that_ far off the ground.

“Give me a boost,” Betty says, still tilting and leaning as she surveys the window.

“What?”

“Up there. You’re tall,” she explains, gesturing at the roof’s direction. “Archie always leaves his window open.”

He looks at her like she’s grown a second head, which she feels is undeserved. It’s a perfectly reasonable plan. “Yeah, no,” Jughead says. “I’m not helping you break into someone’s house. You can be a criminal all on your own here.”

“It’s not _breaking_ in if I’ve been _invited_ in,” Betty says, knowing full well what a bullshit argument she’s making. Breaking in is breaking in. “You were more than willing to help me break in when you lost me my bobby pin. Hypocrite.”

With her jacket sleeve pulled over her hand, she brushes off the spray of snow dusted over the rail before pulling herself up onto it.

“Well?” Betty asks, looking back down at him. “Are you helping or not?”

She hears him mutter to himself again, something about how he _‘can’t believe he’s doing this’_ and it’s on the tip of her tongue to just tell him that if he has something he wants to say to her, that he should just own up to it and say it to her face.

But she holds back when he hops up on the ledge next to her.

“How’re we doing this?” he asks.

“I’m going to climb up this column,” Betty says. She’s impressed with how confident she sounds since she’s flying by the seat of her pants here and saying what she thinks are frankly nonsense words. “You just - I don’t know - hold my foot and make sure I don’t fall.”

“Or, you could put your foot here, and-”

“I really wouldn’t argue with me right now if I were you,” Betty says flatly.

“Fine,” he says, laying his right hand over his left before extending them over to her. “For the record, I think this is a bad idea.”

“You know,” she says, stepping onto his hands with a little more force than necessary before wrapping a leg around the porch column, “I don’t know that I care.” 

 

 

 

She isn’t making the progress that she’d hoped she’d be making.

She has a hand grasping onto the edge of the rain gutter now, but in terms of height, she really isn’t any closer to the roof.

“I told you this wouldn’t work,” Betty hears him mutter.

“It’s working,” she snaps back. “It’s just taking time. It’s a process.”

“You haven’t moved an inch.”

“I’m practically on the roof, so I’ll thank you to not criticize my climbing ski-”

Betty lets out a yelp when she feels her foot wobble in his hand.

“Sorry,” he says.

She doesn’t know why she thought it was a good idea to put her life in this guy’s hands. “I swear to god, if you drop me-”

“Believe me, it’s tempting.”

“Yeah, well, I’m taking you down with me if I go,” Betty says. “Can you lift me higher?”

“I’m trying,” Jughead bites out. “You think this is easy?”

“Just, like, an inch more, I’m almost-”

“-boot feels like a goddamn sword-”

“-if I could just, just grab hold of that-”

“-heel is like a knife-”

“-really need to clean these rain gutters, it’s gross up-”

“-hey, watch for the-”

“Ah!”

Betty grasps wildly for the shingles as her hands slip and slide from the metal, kicking her legs out with reckless abandon as she attempts to anchor her foot on the column it’d slipped from.

She isn’t able to, but she does feel the edge of her shoe _connect_ with something as she’s tumbling backwards in the air.

_“Fuck!”_

As she sits up from her spread-eagle flop back onto the snow, feeling her jeans soak through and send a biting chill onto her ass as she does, she figures that the something she’d connected with, was him.

More specifically, his right eye he’s cradling in his hands now as a string of lowly muttered profanities floats her way.

“Sorry,” Betty says sheepishly, pushing herself onto her feet and brushing off the remnants of snow still sticking to her. “My bad.”

_“You kicked me!”_

She’d thought it’d really felt more like a light tap herself, but she doesn’t think making that distinction now will curry her any favor.

“I’m sorry,” Betty repeats hurriedly, crouching low to gather up a ball of snow in her hands before extending it over to him.

“I can’t see!”

At that, Betty thinks about taking her olive branch of a snowball and whipping it at him. It’s a strange kind of defense mechanism, but that comment has her blood running a little cold, and her feeling like she has to defend herself and put up her metaphorical dukes.

Because she’s pretty sure she can get sued for kicking someone in the face and unwittingly leading them to lost vision. At the very least, it’s probably punishable by a night in the slammer.

And she’s been drinking, too.

 _And_ trying to climb up onto someone’s roof to break in via an open window.

Optically, it’s not looking great for her.

“I said I was sorry,” Betty says once more for good measure. “It’s not like I meant to.”

“I think I might be concussed!”

“I don’t think so,” she says unconvincingly. “I mean you’re sitting up and talking and every-”

He glares at her. “You couldn’t come up with a more terrible response if you tried.”

“I do kickboxing.”

_Her goddamn mouth._

She doesn’t know why, of all the things in the world, she’d chosen to say that. Clearly, he hadn’t meant for her to actually give it the old college try.

But it seems to work in the way of shutting him up. Betty watches as he slowly peels open his right eye, eyelashes fluttering against the quickly-forming bruise at the delicate skin below his lash line.

She doesn’t even know if that bruise is really her fault. The guy has pretty pronounced circles around his eyes to begin with.

“Are you okay?” Betty ventures eventually.

“‘I do kickboxing,’” he mutters. “Where do you get off?”

Betty holds back an eye roll. “Are you okay?” she repeats.

Jughead scowls over at her. “Does it _look_ like I’m okay?”

 _Well,_ she thinks, _you’re conscious so that’s something._

“Can you see?”

Jughead blinks slowly while waving his right hand in front of his eye. “Barely.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?” she asks, raising her pointer and middle finger in front of him.

“Two.”

“Good.”

It’s a question she really shouldn’t be asking right now because he looks ticked off enough as it is, but she doesn’t really see any other option. “You, uh, wouldn’t happen to want to try yourself, would you?” Betty asks, gesturing towards the roof she’d just failed at scaling.

The hand he’s been waving in front of his eye slaps down to his leg in disbelief. “I’m going home.”

She expected that.

“Sorry again about the eye,” she calls as he fades from view, beanie still slightly skewed as he shakes his head.

 _It’s fine,_ Betty thinks as she climbs back up on the porch ledge again. She can figure this out. It’s not like he’d been helping much, anyhow.

 

 

 

 _Fine,_ she ends up conceding, but only to herself.

He’d been helping a little more than she’d given him credit for.

 

 

 

 _The best way to do this,_ she thinks when she’s fallen off the ledge yet again, _is to reverse-rappel up the side of the column and find a way to swing her leg over the edge of the roof._

 _Yes. This should work._ She’ll grab on with both hands to the gutter and just walk her feet up, no problem.

She has one leg wrapped around the column and is swinging wildly at the rain gutter she can’t reach when she hears his voice call back to her.

That leads her to fall number three.

“You can come, if you want,” he says, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “I have a couch.”

His shoulders are tense and taught, and he’s looking at her with what she thinks is absolute insincerity in his offer.

But because she doesn’t want to spend any more time out here in the cold or worse, fall off the roof, break her neck, and come morning, be forever more known as the woman found dead in a light-up reindeer boob sweater, she follows him for the fourth time on this unholy night.

 

 

 

“You can have the bed,” Jughead tells her, throwing his keys onto a little hallway table she thinks might actually be a dresser meant for the bedroom.

“The couch is fine,” Betty says.

“Suit yourself. It’s a pull-out but you can do whatever you want.”

When he disappears behind a closed door - his bedroom she figures, but she frankly wouldn’t be surprised if it’s some kind of sex dungeon or room with human heads, either - Betty takes the time to look over his apartment. She heard that they were razing the old Southside and putting up these apartments a few years ago - Archie had worked on the new developments himself - but she’d thought the end result would be a little _nicer_ than this.

But, she thinks, looking a little more carefully and the wood floors and concrete countertops, that maybe the apartment _is_ perfectly nice.

It’s just his furniture that isn’t.

There’s a lot of things that are playing double - a bedroom dresser moonlighting as an entertainment unit, an end table that’s she’s sure is a nightstand, and the one that makes her frown the most - a bookshelf with a half-full glass of water sitting in front of the books.

 _Heathen,_ she thinks _. The sink is_ right there.

“Here,” Jughead says, emerging from the bedroom and pulling the door shut firmly behind him. Betty feels her eyes involuntarily roll at that.

She highly doubts there’s been anyone of the female persuasion in there before given his grating personality, and she’s not about to offer herself up as volunteer-number-one.

“Thanks,” Betty says when he hands her a stack of sheets and a blanket.

“Did you decide?”

“About?”

Jughead nods over to the couch. “Pull-out or just leave it?”

“Oh, uh,” Betty begins, “pull out, I guess. I can do it.”

“It’s fine,” he says as he throws the couch cushions off to the side. “There’s some clothes there for you if you want.”

“Oh!” Betty says. She hadn’t been excited by the thought of sleeping in the clothes she’s wearing now, especially since her jeans are still wet. There’s a t-shirt with a very random _‘S’_ screened on the front, she finds as she flips through the stack of sheets, and to her horror, a pair of boxers. “Oh.”

It must be her tone that gives her away because he looks like he’s ready to smack his head against his coffee table. “What’s wrong now?”

“Nothing!”

“Just say it. I’m tired and I-”

“-you, um, don’t have sweatpants?” Betty asks.

She may be in a stranger’s house, and she may be entirely out of her element here. But she’s still a lady, and she’s not about to wear this random guy’s underwear to bed.

“I have the ones I have on,” Jughead says.

“You only have one pair of sweatpants?”

“Who needs more than one pair?”

“People,” Betty says sharply. She has a whole drawerful herself and it’s only right she defends it. Really, how dare he make her feel bad about it. “Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. Here,” she says, passing back the pair of folded boxers between two fingers. “Thank you, but I won’t be needing these.”

She watches as he puts two-and-two together before frowning at her. “You know they’re clean, right?” Jughead says, snatching them back from her. “I don’t know who you think I am, but I didn’t just hand you clothes I fished out of my dirty laundry.”

“Yes, well, I prefer sleeping in jeans. I do it all the time.”

She’s such a liar.

“You _sleep in jeans_ all the time?”

“At least three times a week.”

What she does do three times a week is unbutton her jeans at her front door before she even has keys in the lock, but he doesn’t need to know that taking off her pants and bra is one of her most favorite and treasured activities of the day.

He tips his head slightly at her in disbelief. “You sleep in jeans three times a week.”

“Sometimes four.”

“You from another planet, or-”

“They make me feel safe,” Betty interrupts. She doesn’t know what is it with her and lying tonight; it must be the stress that’s bringing it out of her. “In case an intruder comes in, I can just get up and run out the door.”

“Right, because pajama pants would keep you from doing that.”

_Damn it._

If she’s going to lie, she really ought to think through the lie before committing to it.

“Whatever,” Jughead says, shrugging. “I hope you and your jeans sleep well.”

Later, when she sees the light under his bedroom door turn off, she switches out her sweater for the shirt he’d given her, and wriggles out of her jeans with a content sigh.

She’s been waiting to take those off all night.

 

 

 

Betty wakes, midway through a screech as she’s sliding off the pull-out bed.

It takes her a minute to come to and realize where she is, but the cold floor quickly chilling her bare legs clues her in pretty quickly.

She’s in a crappy apartment on a crappy floor after having fallen off a crappy pull-out bed.

“Shit,” she mutters when she stands and surveys the very broken, sad looking couch staring right back at her.

She should’ve taken his bed. At least then he could only blame himself for his couch falling to pieces.

Sighing, Betty gathers the blanket around herself and folds the broken bed back over.

 _Ikea,_ she reads as she does.

Figures.

But at the very least, she can put the couch back to the way it’d been and just sleep on that. The fabric is ripped, and one of the legs has fallen off completely, but it should be fine if she can just get the bed back into the couch. 

 

 

 

It’s not fine.

What it is, is stuck at a strange, forty-five degree angle and not budging no matter how much she pushes and shoves at it.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Betty mutters, absentmindedly rubbing at the shoulder she’d tried shoving into the bed. She rarely uses that word, but this is the time for it.

Drawing in a deep breath in preparation to try again, Betty cricks out her neck before putting her full weight behind the pull-out bed. And, to her surprise, it budges a little.

“Come on, you piece of crap,” she mutters between her gritted teeth. “Come _on.”_ _Just a little more. Just a little-_

“Ow!” she yelps she feels the metal pinch at her skin, and on instinct, she kicks at the couch’s base.

Forget it.

She’s not about to get eaten alive by this fantastically shitty couch for anything. There’s a bed in this apartment, she’s tired and she’s hungry, and she’s so incredibly over it.

  

 

 

If she’s going in there, she really should wear pants, she thinks as she stares down his bedroom door. It seems larger in the dark, a little more imposing than it had before, and fleetingly she wonders what the hell she’s going to do if he actually _has_ a human head in there.

 _Just wear the pants,_ she thinks.

But she just hates wearing jeans to sleep.

She hates it so much. There’s nothing she hates more.

And life is too short to do something she hates.

Bundling the threadbare blanket he’d given her up over her head and wrapping it tightly between her legs, she waddles over to the closed door and pushes it open.

 

 

 

The man named Jughead, she learns, is a man who sleeps diagonally across the bed and with his blankets cocooned around him.

If she weren’t so tired, the fact that he hugs his pillow under his head would probably something she’d find kind of cute, but as it is, right now nothing’s cute.

“Excuse me,” Betty says, shuffling over to the bed and poking his shoulder. “Uh, hey.”

He isn’t budging.

_Who the hell sleeps this deeply with a stranger in the house?_

“Jughead,” she tries again, raising her voice and shaking his shoulder with gusto. _Get up,_ she wills him in her mind. _Get up, get up, get-_

She just barely manages to pull her arm back in time when he waves her off.

Betty blows out a little puff of air at that. There’s a method her mother used on her back in the day that worked wonders, but it’s a little mean, and she’d rather not employ it now if she can help it.

“Hello?” she calls once more. “Hello?”

Crickets.

Sighing, Betty moves closer to his face in preparation. She can’t say she didn’t try.

_“Wake up!”_

“What the fuck!” She jumps back when he shoots upright. He’s pissed, she can tell. He’s definitely not happy with her. _“What?”_

“Hi,” Betty says dumbly.

 _“Hi?_ Seriously, were you dropped on your head as a kid? What d’you want? And can you not look like that in the middle of the night? Jesus.”

“Like what?”

“Like that - blanket pulled up over your head. You look like a gremlin and it’s terrifying.”

And just like that, her good-will evaporates. She knows it’s not the most fashionable of looks but she’d rather not be told she looks like some kind of furry beast, either.

“I’m freezing.”

He rubs the corner of his eye - the one that she’d kicked - and she thinks fleetingly that it doesn’t really look that bad. He would be overly dramatic about the whole thing. “What do you want?” Jughead repeats.

“Can I sleep in here?”

“What? Why?”

She doesn’t know why this is her life.

She’s a good person.

She doesn’t deserve this.

“The couch broke.”

_“You broke my couch?”_

For an English teacher, he has a terrible habit of mincing her words. “It broke _itself,”_ Betty says.

_“How?”_

“How would I know? I was sleeping,” Betty says. “I wasn’t out there taking a hammer and chainsaw to it if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Unbelievable,” Jughead mutters, scooting over onto one side of the bed. “I try to do one nice thing, and of course it’s for the person who escaped from the loony bin a few hours-”

“I’ll have you know that this isn’t ideal for me either,” Betty interrupts as she half climbs, half falls into the bed in an effort to keep her blanket secure around her. “So it’ll just be better for all of us if you kept your commentary to yourself.”

“I should’ve just stayed home tonight,” he says, flopping back onto the bed and scrubbing a hand over his face. “I really just should’ve stayed home.”

“Yeah, well, same.”

When she hears him muttering something else to himself under his breath, Betty presses her hands over her left ear, pushing her right firmly into the bed. It’s completely childish, but it’s not like he can really see her in the dark anyhow.

“Here,” Betty hears him say before she feels something heavy fall over her. _His duvet,_ she realizes as she peeks out from under her blanket. “So you don’t wake me up by screaming in my face again.”

“Thanks,” she mumbles as she pulls it up to her chin.

 _It smells like him,_ she finds herself thinking as she drifts off. _And it’s kind of a nice smell._

 

 

 

There are three things she notices when she wakes.

The first is that it’s bright out and it’s doing absolutely nothing to help with the thumping headache she feels setting into either temple.

The second is that her cheek is pressed into the arm he has wrapped around her, and she’s drooling on it.

The third is that her all-mighty blanket-wall has fallen somewhere between last night and now and her more or less bare ass is resting flush against a man she doesn’t know.

“Oh my god,” Betty hisses quietly to herself as she slips down from under the weight of his arm before rolling off the bed.

 

 

 

She needs to get out of here, she thinks as she surveys the room. She needs to leave right now. This is all far too strange for her to deal with early on a Sunday morning, and frankly, she doesn’t know how to make conversation with a man she’s kicked then pushed her ass up against while hungover.

Betty frowns as she leans over the bed to peek at his eye.

Even she’ll admit it looks pretty bad.

It’s an impressive, jagged circle he has around it, purple in some places, pink in others, and blue on the ridge of his nose. There’s a hairline cut on his cheekbone, too, one that she hadn’t noticed the night before, now adding a lovely touch of scarlet red to the rainbow on his face.

She really didn’t think she’d kicked him that hard and instinctively, she leans closer to him to make sure he’s still alive. Betty doesn’t know if anyone has died because of a black eye before, but she figures she should check.

 _He’s alive,_ she notes after she hears the steady, quiet woosh of his inhales. _Good_.

Betty hops across the room on her toes in three quick strides, creaking the bedroom door open just enough for her creep through into the living room.

Where she’s greeted by that _fucking couch,_ pull-out bed still sticking up at a glorious angle, and broken leg propped up pathetically against the base.

She’s really done a number on this guy, she thinks mournfully as she shimmies into her jeans, jumping slightly as she tries to pull them up over her thighs.

These devil pants.

 _I’ll get his number from Archie and offer to pay for the couch,_ Betty tells herself as pulls his front door shut behind her quietly. _Or I’ll send him an ice-pack or something. But that can all be done over the phone and far away from this apartment and Riverdale._

She’s halfway back to the city in a Zipcar with a new battery before she even realizes that she’s still wearing his shirt, and that her very cherished, 2016 red-ribbon winning sweater is still lying back there somewhere on the floor of his apartment.

 

 


	2. Saturday #2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To bugggghead who beta'ed this so quickly and diligently and on Christmas Eve - you are the wind beneath my wings.

 

Betty is a bite or two into the expensive, bougie salad she’s treating herself to because it’s Friday and she’s been having a marvelous week when she’s jolted right out of her bliss.

Betty jumps at the noise from her tote. _It’s always on silent,_ she thinks as she scrambles for it.

_Who the hell has been messing with her phone?_

_“Sorry,”_ Betty mouths around to the other tables as she brings up the _‘I-don’t-know-who-could-be-calling-me’_ hands for emphasis.

It’s probably her mother. Alice Cooper never understands the time-zone difference, although this is far preferable to four in the morning.

“Hello?”

 _Oh right,_ she remembers. _She’d turned it off last night when she’d been checking the sound quality on her home videos of Caramel._ They haven’t been up to snuff recently.

“I’m looking for Betty Cooper?”

“Speaking,” Betty says, cradling her phone between her ear and her shoulder as she pokes through her salad. They’ve forgot her bacon.

Again.

 _This fucking place._ Like she doesn’t pay enough for the food here.

“This is Jughead Jones.”

At the name, Betty stiffens and her fork drops from her hand, sending a corn kernel flying over the edge of the plastic container.

“Hi,” Betty says slowly. “You. I mean, Jughead! So listen, about that night. I’m _really_ sorry about the-”

“That’s actually what I was calling about,” he interrupts, voice firm. “I was hoping to get your address.”

_Oh god._

She tells herself to breathe. “For?”

“Court papers. For the eye. And the couch, too, come to think of it. I’ll have to tell my lawyer to add that.”

_Oh, good god._

“Lawyer?” Betty hears herself squeak.

“Yeah,” Jughead says. “The person you typically hire when you want to sue someone?”

“Sue? As in lawsuit?”

“As in.”

“Do you think that’s a little premature? You know, I was actually _just_ about to call you and see if I could pay you for the couch. And your medical bills if you have any. Or I could send you an ice pack!” Betty holds up a hand to her face to block the view of the person sitting next to her. No one needs to be privy to this embarrassment but her. “Or some makeup. I have this really great concealer, I use it on the days I get an especially bad zit, and trust me, it’s like magic - you can barely see-”

“I-”

“It’d probably be cheaper for you if I just paid you back, too. Legal fees are really such a rip-off-”

“I really just need the address.”

Betty thinks she hears him say something else, but she can’t hear it over the pounding of her heart in her ears.

“Okay,” she breathes out eventually, pursing her lips together in an attempt to contain the warble in her voice. She’s always owned up to her wrongs and if this is what it’s come to, then she’s just going to have to deal with it. Veronica’s in law school - she’s sure she can find someone to do this for her, pro-bono. And maybe, she can sue him back, too.

If there’s any legal basis for being a petty, smug little muppet, Veronica would know.

“You still there?”

“Yeah,” Betty says. _Don’t hang up._ “The address. Sure. It’s uh-” _Don’t lie. It’ll only come back to bite you in your already bitten ass._ “It’s Eighty, Third-”

 _Sniffle_.

“Avenue-”

 _Wheeze_.

“Apartment 7-”

 _Sob_.

“J. New York-”

“Oh, shit,” Jughead interrupts quickly. “Are you crying? Please, uh - please don’t cry. I’m not suing you, I just – Archie said that would make you laugh. I didn’t think it was that funny, and I wasn’t going to do it, but he said this is your sense of humor and I just wanted to-”

“What?”

“I was kidding.”

“Wait,” she hiccups, “so you’re not suing me?”

“No. I’m – no.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I was just calling about your sweater.”

“My what?”

“You know, Dasher and Dancer? The blue-ribbon winner? I figured you’d want it back.”

It clicks then. “Oh,” Betty says, idly drawing a hand over her heart, still beating in furious overtime. “My sweater. It was a red ribbon, actually.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Veronica doesn’t like blue.”

She doesn’t know why she’s saying any of this but in her defense, she kind of feels like she’s still about to faint face first into her salad.

“Go figure,” he says, voice kind. “Do you want me to send it to you? Or I could give it to Archie-”

“No!” Betty interrupts quickly. “I mean, no, that’s okay. I’m actually going to be in Riverdale tomorrow, so I can just pick it up then, if you’re around. I, um, have... dinner plans with Archie.”

_That she’ll have to make once this phone call from hell is over._

It pains her to have to send her Saturday schedule of moving from one end of the couch to the other up in flames, but she can’t in good conscience ask the guy to throw her sweater in the mail for her after everything.

And if he gives it to Archie, she’ll have to deal with questions about why her sweater was off her body at all.

She wonders how much Archie already knows. He knows about the couch, for sure, and probably the eye, too.

But she wonders if he knows that she, Betty Cooper, the same she that had once thought it was a good idea to jump into Sweetwater River nude at age five, still apparently has the tendency to ditch her pants in very inappropriate situations.

She has to get better at learning her lessons.

“That’s fine,” Jughead says. She thinks he sounds excited - probably at the idea of digging at her a little more for the show she’d put on last weekend and the fact that she has to crawl her way back to Riverdale to suffer the consequences. “I’ll be around, so just let me know.”

 

 

 

When he hangs up, Betty breathes out a shaky breath before returning to her food.

 _The salad isn’t appetizing anymore_ , Betty thinks mournfully as she throws her napkin over her food in defeat before gathering up her tray. Trust him to ruin her fabulous lunch.

If anything, she should sue _him_ for emotional distress. And for another salad.

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” the woman next to her says kindly as she rises from her table. “But I know a great lawyer if you need one, hon.”

“Oh,” Betty says. “That’s okay. Thank you, but that - wasn’t what it sounded like.”

She doesn’t think she’ll be able to show face in this cafe again after the scene she’d just pulled, but maybe it’s for the best.

They’re bacon hoarders, anyhow.

 

 

 

That evening, she throws Jughead’s shirt into the laundry while preheating her oven.

It’s not the most glamorous of Friday nights, but she figures it’s a necessary evil.

She’s been wearing it to bed since she’d arrived home with it that Sunday, which is a little gross of her, because it’d probably been ready for the hamper by Wednesday. But in her own defense, it’s the most comfortable shirt she’s ever worn.

That, and the un-marvelous task of doing her laundry hadn’t really fit within the parameters of her otherwise marvelous week.

 _What a shame,_ Betty thinks ruefully as she tosses the shirt into the washer.

She’d kind of been hoping to keep it.

 

 

 

Archie picks her up at Riverdale’s station because she isn’t about to make the same mistake and rent another car prone to attracting deer again. While he’s driving her to Pop’s, Betty can’t help but think that he’s looking at her like he knows.

He knows all the big, bad things she’d done last weekend and he’s just waiting for the right moment to drop it on her.

“So, why dinner?” Archie asks, swiping his french fry in his milkshake before popping it into his mouth. “You never come back to Riverdale except for the big stuff.”

Betty shrugs. “Why not dinner? It’s not like I got to talk to you much at the party. And excuse you, I come back for stuff.”

She really hopes Archie lets that one slide because as it is, the last thing she remembers coming back to Riverdale for was the previous year’s Christmas bash, and she’d Irish-exited her way out of that within an hour.

“Did you have fun at the party?” Archie asks instead. “Did _I_ have fun?”

“Arch,” Betty says, extending a hand across the table and petting it mockingly, “ _no one_ had more fun than you.”

“Sick. Did you guys break the couch while having sex on it? You and Jughead?”

She knew - she just knew Archie would drop it like that. Casually and in the middle of a conversation, like he’s asking for the time or the weather.

Which is why she’s upset that she doesn’t have a better comeback than blinking a few times at him.

“Is that how he got the black eye?” Archie continues.

“You thought I gave this guy a _black eye_ while hooking up with him? What do you think I do during… that?”

Sometimes, it’s a hard word to say. Especially around Archie.

“I don’t know, hands can slip!”

“Yeah? Who’d you accidentally give a black eye to during sex?”

“Anyway,” Archie says, and she can tell by the way his eyes shift that there’s plenty more to that story. “I thought that’s what the whole phone number thing was about. The guy was so nervous.”

She can’t help herself here. “He was nervous? How? Why?”

“Hey, uh, Archie, you um, you know your friend, uh, Betty?” Archie starts, in a tone and voice she thinks is honestly not a bad imitation of Jughead’s. “With the ponytail that’s going to give her a receding hairline? Do you, uh, have her, uh number?”

It’s really impressive that this guy has the ability to piss her off even while not being physically present.

Her hairline is her own to worry about.

“So you’re not in Riverdale to see him right now?”

In the most literal definition of _‘see,'_ she supposes that technically, she is. But since she knows Archie means _‘see’_ in an entirely different way, Betty shakes her head.

“Nope.”

“You didn’t like him?”

 _“No._ Why would you think that I would?”

“You like books, he teaches kids about books,” Archie says, shrugging. “I don’t know, Betty, you spend your time dating these guys with pastel polo and sweater combos you have nothing in common with. I just thought you’d like a guy better if you did.”

“I have things in common with the guys I date.”

“Like the fact that they can share clothes with your dad?”

Betty frowns; it’s not untrue. But she also doesn’t think that it matters. So what if she tends towards guys who can pull off a sweater combo and who have roman numerals at the end of their names? The guys she’s dated have their faults - ‘ _it’s Nantucket Red, Betty, not salmon’_ \- but they’re all nice enough.

“That’s beside the point. I don’t like his face, so it doesn’t really matter,” Betty says, and immediately, she feels guilty. He doesn’t have a bad face. The things that come out of his mouth are annoying and detract from its overall pleasantness, but with his mouth shut, his face isn’t all that bad. “And by the way,” Betty says, pointing her fork at Archie in accusation, “why would you tell him that making me think he’s going to _sue me_ is ‘my sense of humor’?”

At that, Archie laughs, so boomingly that a piece of burger flies out his mouth and right towards her.

She’s forgotten how truly disgusting Archie can be.

“Oh my god,” Archie wheezes. “He actually did that?”

_“Yes.”_

Archie slaps the table so loudly that the couple across the aisle from them jumps. “He’s such an idiot.”

“I cried into my salad _in public_ because of you! Right on Fifth Avenue! In the middle of lun - stop laughing!”

But she lets Archie have his moment because her telling him to shut up again will only have him laughing more. And in hindsight, if the whole thing had been in a vacuum and had it not happened to her, maybe it would’ve been just a little funny.

“I’m not even sorry,” Archie tells her as he bites into a fry, shoulders still shaking with amusement.

“Yeah, I bet you’re not.”

“Hey, you free next Saturday?”

_As a bird._

“Maybe,” Betty says. In her experience, it’s always better to know what the plans are before committing. That way, she isn’t roped into a medieval times sing-a-long cruise again. “I might have to work. Why?”

She knows that Archie sees right through her, but he lets it slide. “The band’s playing in Greendale,” he says. “You should come.”

Her instinct is to turn Archie down immediately - she’d really rather not spend another weekend coming back to this place if she can help it. But she’s also been promising that she’d come see Archie’s band for months now, too.

“I’ll try,” Betty says.

Archie smiles.

 

 

 

Archie drops her at the train station where she waits for exactly ten minutes before walking in the other direction. She wouldn’t put it past Archie to lie in wait behind some tree or bush to try to catch her out, but she also knows he has the patience of a dingbat.

Five minutes, she’d figured, is the upward bounds on his limit. She’s seen him eat a half-frozen Hot Pocket before just because Archie Andrews waits for no microwave.

At his building, Betty realizes in a quick panic that he has no idea she’s quite literally at his doorstep. She considers sending a courtesy _‘I’m here,’_ text, but at the end of the day, she’d really rather not communicate with him any more than she has to.

Betty sighs as she raises her curled fist, drawing it back in preparation to knock.

_It’s fine. Just get it over with. It’s at most a thirty second interac-_

_“Ow!”_

“Oh my god!”

Instinctively, both hands, the one at her side and the one that’d just clocked him right in the nose as he’d swung the door open, fly to her face as she covers her mouth in shock.

There’s a single moment of confusion that crosses his face as he looks between her and his shoulder, before it’s replaced by pure disbelief.

Probably from the fact that there she is in all her glory, causing injury to his person. Again.

At least it wasn’t his eye this time.

“-I’m so sor-”

“-I knew I should’ve just mailed it back.”

_This guy has no fucking filter._

“Well, why didn’t you… you _check_ to make sure no one was there before just throwing the door open like that?” Betty fires back, gesturing towards the peephole.

She doesn’t know if she’s ever had a worse leg to stand on before.

“Is that how you take out the trash?” Jughead bites back. “You know what? Don’t answer. I’m sure that’s exactly what a person who’s nuts enough to sleep in jeans would do.”

Betty steps back as he slides past her before padding down the hall to dump the trash down the chute, all the while wondering if she really needs her sweater back that badly.

It’s already won the red ribbon. It’s not like it’s going to win again.

“I need to find it,” Jughead says, holding the door open a little wider than necessary. If this bozo lost her sweater, he won’t hear the end of it from her. “You can come in if you want.”

“I really don’t.”

“Fine by me.”

He leaves the door slightly ajar, but because she’s feeling especially petty, Betty pulls it shut with a pronounced click. She doesn’t need to know or see any more of this guy than she has to. It’ll only upset her.

Beyond the door, she hears him scoff loudly before tugging it back open.

“Before you come at me for shrinking it,” Jughead says, holding out her sweater to her, “all I did was fold it.”

 _Poorly_.

“Whatever,” Betty says, tucking it safely in her bag before tossing his shirt to him. “It’s clean. Oh, and here.” She hesitates as she unearths the Tupperware she’d shoved to the bottom of her tote. “Not that you deserve them.”

Betty watches as he slowly takes the box from her, eyes narrowed as he peers through the clear plastic.

“Are these… cookies?”

It’s really the height of rudeness, the way he’s staring at them now. She’s been told her cookies are phenomenal. By Juniper, who has to suffer through Polly’s meatloaf surprise three times a week, but still - they don’t deserve this type of scrutiny by the likes of him.

“You can stop looking at them like that,” Betty snaps. “I didn’t poison them. They’re perfectly edible.”

“No, I’m sure they are,” Jughead says quickly. “I’ve just… never had a Christmas cookie before.”

_“What?”_

“I don’t really do… all this. Christmas.”

“Huh?”

“Is this impression of a fish you have going on your incredulity, or are you genuinely not processing this?”

“I’m… I’m sorry,” Betty says quickly, snapping her mouth shut and shaking herself out of her funk. “You’ve had... _regular_ cookies before, right? Like you know what a snickerdoodle is?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday.” Betty thinks about making some good counterpoints against that but what’s more interesting is the way he turns the Tupperware, examining her handiwork. “Why do the snowmen look like that?”

She was hoping he wouldn’t notice.

“I, um, gave them black eyes,” she admits, compressing the latter half of her sentence as it tumbles out of her mouth. She’d thought she was being witty at the time. “Because - well, you know.”

There’s no way he couldn’t because he’s still wearing the evidence on his face. It’s looking less horrendous than last week, but there’s still a prominent, yellowing bruise stamped there.

“Funny,” he says, and she thinks from the hint of a smile she sees, that he actually might think so. “Did you, um - did you want to come in?”

“To... there?”

“I can’t in good conscience eat these all myself. I mean, I can. But you’re welcome to some, if you want.”

“Oh,” Betty says slowly. She isn’t really hungry after two milkshakes - strawberry and vanilla because she couldn’t decide - but she is kind of curious to see what this Scrooge eating his first Christmas cookie looks like.

Also, she likes being told her cooking is good. And she knows for a fact those cookies are very excellent.

“Uh, sure. Yeah, that’s - sure. Great.”

Betty ducks under his arm as he pushes the door open, and the first thing she notices when she steps past the threshold is Jughead Jones’ brand new couch.

 

 

 

“Oh,” Betty says slowly. “That’s… new. It’s nice!”

It’s even uglier than the old one.

She didn’t know they still made couches like this anymore. It reminds her of the one her grandmother used to have, floral-printed and a little like a Monet if someone had thrown up on it, patterned onto furniture.

“Yeah, I don’t know how you sleep, but I couldn’t fix the old one,” he says, plopping down on the couch.

 _If anything,_ that’s _why the other hunk of junk broke_.

“Listen, I can pay you back for the couch,” Betty offers, heart breaking at the idea of having to throw monetary support behind something that she thinks should be scheduled to go up with the next dumpster fire. “I have cash. Not much, but-”

“Forget it,” Jughead says, holding out the open Tupperware to her. “That thing was old.”

If he’s not going to push her on it, then she’s more than willing to let it go.

Betty takes a cookie from the box before sitting down slowly, and only on the very edge of the monstrosity.

 

 

 

“You can sit on it,” Jughead says.

“I am.”

“Like, actually sit on it.”

“I am _actually_ sitting on it. This is how I sit.”

“If you say so,” he says shrugging, but she thinks she hears something along the lines of ‘ _so weird’_ as he bites off the side of a snowman-shaped cookie.

If anything, _he’s_ weird. Who goes for the side first?

It’s always the head.

Betty waits for him to swallow before venturing her question. There’d been a little less _‘mmm-ing’_ and _‘ah-ing’_ than she’d anticipated, but maybe he’s just not a vocal eater. “What do you think?”

“Honestly?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I mean, they’re a little dry but overall-”

_What the fuck._

“I’m sorry, but were you raised by a pack of wolves? What is _wrong_ with-”

“I’m kidding!” Jughead interrupts quickly, holding up both hands. “I’m kidding. My god. So serious. It’s a joke - I’m joking.”

 _“Your jokes aren’t funny!_ This or the stupid phone call!”

He’s quiet for a moment before - “I think they’re kind of funny.”

She’s leaving and she’s taking her cookies with her right now.

“You’re really something else, you know that?” Betty says, snatching the container from him hard enough that a reindeer topples over the edge and onto the floor.  She’d rather hand them out to passengers on the train than have them go so unappreciated like this. “I mean, who do you think you are, telling me-”

“I’m sorry,” he says quickly, rising to meet her. “Honestly, they’re great. I really mean that. I wouldn’t have said anything if I knew you were so touchy about your cookies.”

“I’m not _touchy_ about my cookies.”

“It was a bad joke,” Jughead says, voice falling quiet and serious. “I was just - I don’t know, trying to be funny.”

“Yeah, well you’re-”

“I know, I’m not. Clearly. That was rude of me, and I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry, Betty,” Jughead says, and when she sees pink bloom across his cheeks, her eyebrows draw up to her hairline. “I really am. For the cookies and the phone call.”

“You really should think before you speak.”

“Noted.”

“I’m not touchy about my cookies.”

“Okay.”

“And you’re not funny.”

She’d thrown that in just because she’s still nursing a bruised ego, and even though she knows it’s wrong, she can’t help but go for his, too.

“I’m not funny,” he agrees, and the eye roll he sends her has her narrowing her own. “Can I have them back now?”

 

 

 

When he has five cookies under his belt, Betty decides to let it go. He might’ve eaten the first one or two to placate her, but she doubts that anyone would really suffer through five dry cookies just to prove a point.

“So, what’s your deal?” Betty asks, scooting back an inch on the couch. She needs to say something to break the silence - she’s been staring between him chewing and the scene he has paused on the tv for far too long. She’s seen this particular documentary before and fleetingly, she wonders what he thinks about it. “What do you mean you ‘don’t do Christmas’?”

“What’s not to get? I don’t do it.”

“So no tree?” she asks, even though the answer is plainly obvious. There’s a corner between the media center and window she thinks would do nicely, but there’s nothing more there than a few game consoles and a massive tangle of wires she can’t look too hard at, lest she fall on her knees and start pulling them apart herself. “No presents, just plain old avoiding it all together?”

“Pretty much. I’ll make an exception for the food though,” Jughead says, fishing for cookie number six. “Seriously, these are good. Thanks for bringing them.”

“You’re welcome,” Betty says. It’s a surprise to even her when she finds that she means it.

 

 

 

“You thirsty?” he asks, brushing off his fingertips as he walks over to the kitchen. She’s never liked the idea of these open kitchens that face the living room head-on, but apparently they’re all the rage in these new apartment complexes.

“I have orange juice,” Jughead offers, and from the brief peek of his fridge she gets, she can tell it’s mostly empty. “Or coffee, or… this one teabag. Or hot chocolate.”

“I’ll take that,” Betty says. She’d really rather go for tea, but the fact that he’d fished out one lonesome teabag from somewhere in that cabinet scares her a little.

“Oh,” Jughead says as he peers into the box. “Sorry.”

She questions just why he’d been hoarding an empty box of Swiss Miss to begin with.

“Just water’s fine, then.”

Betty sips deeply from the glass he hands her, scooting her legs back as he brushes past before collapsing back on the couch.

“Now I want hot chocolate,” Jughead muses, reaching for another cookie. She considers telling him to stop - her cookies aren’t made to be thrown up.

“You didn’t fill your sugar quota from all those?”

“Not really. Too bad nowhere’s open.”

At that, Betty frowns. “Do you not know what Dooligan’s is?”

“No,” Jughead says slowly. “Is that like your very special version of Never Land or-”

 _“No,”_ Betty says pointedly. “I can’t believe you live here and don’t know what Dooligan’s is. Do the kids at school not talk about it?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t make it a point to eavesdrop on kids.”

“It’s like 7-11,” Betty explains. “Two blocks from Jefferson, and right off - seriously, you never heard of it? It’s where we’d go when we’d… get hungry after imbibing.”

“And it’s open?”

“Yeah, twenty four- where are you going?”

Betty twists on the couch as he rises from it. “Dooligan’s,” Jughead says, shrugging on his jacket. “Was that not clear?”

 

 

 

He doesn’t explicitly invite her, but because she thinks it’s weird to hang out in this guy’s apartment without him being there, too, Betty tags along.

Given his antique taste in furniture, she expects him to drive something old and beat up, and she’s surprised when he leads her to one of the six or seven grey Priuses in his building’s lot.

Maybe he’s an environmentalist.

“I can drive,” Betty offers.

“Yeah, no.”

“Why not? You don’t know where it is.”

“Because I like my car and I like my life and I’d rather keep both. You never know when a scary deer might pop up on the side of the road.”

Betty concedes that he’s probably right, but still, she gives it a minute before sliding into the passenger seat.

Where she’s greeted by the most surprising, inane sound when he turns the key in the ignition.

“Is this… Scottish bagpipe music?”

Jughead shrugs. “Sounds like it.”

“Is this like a passion of yours or something?”

“Hey, I wasn’t listening to that,” he says, gesturing to the radio. “I plug in my iPod.”

“Yeah, but still,” she says, fingers spinning on the dial before coming to a stop when she lands on station that’s vaguely Christmas-sounding, “it came up when you turned the car on, so you must’ve been at some point. It’s okay if you’re into this, you know.”

“I’m not.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed because I wasn’t listening to-”

“It doesn’t make you any less of a-”

“Will you stop? I wasn’t listening to that.”

“It’s good expand one’s musical tastes! You know, there’s so much out there, and-”

“-choosing not to listen to me, so-”

“-shouldn’t confine ourselves to just one type of music. We should expand our borders!” Betty says, brandishing an emphatic fist in the air. There’s a warble in her voice and she thinks she’s just about to laugh. “Bridge those divides! Conquer cultures! Find out what makes each other tick, through the sweet, soulful, ancient tradition of music.”

“Fine,” Jughead says, shrugging. “If you want to believe that’s what I listen to, go right ahead.”

Betty sits back against her seat and smiles. “It takes a very big person to admit defeat.”

 

 

 

“What’s your deal with Christmas, anyway?” Betty asks, gesturing towards the next right corner. “Some sob story made you hate the holiday?”

“Kind of. My mom walked out when I was a kid around this time. Allegedly, it’s not like I remember any of it. But my dad never wanted anything to do with it, so we never did.”

“Oh,” Betty says slowly, quietly. She hadn’t been expecting that at all. Her own mother might be eat-pray-loving her way through a city that she’s pretty sure wasn’t even in the book, but at least she’d been there when it’d mattered. “That’s more than kind of.”

“I don’t _hate_ Christmas,” Jughead says. “I’ve just never done anything about it before.”

“Wait, but you said that you’re working at Triple-A because of the holidays.”

“I am. My sister just started college this year, upstate. It’s why I took this job - it’s not like she needs me anymore, but in case she does, I like the idea of being near. She’s a good kid - she never asks for much, doesn’t get into trouble. Anyhow, her roommate invited her to spend Christmas with her this year in California, which is-”

“Far.”

“And expensive. JB - that’s my sister - she was so excited,” Jughead says, and there’s a very strange and unexpected thump of her heart when he smiles fondly at the memory. “Did you know they have a Disneyland in California?”

“Yeah, in Anaheim.”

“Big Disney’s really taking over the world, huh,” Jughead says. “Anyhow, I just wanted her to have a good time out there and not have to worry about money or anything like that. It was either Triple-A or the Stop and Shop.”

Suddenly, she’s very, very sorry about the pull-out she’d broken.

“Jughead, really, about the couch - I should pay you for it. I mean, I was the one sleeping there when it broke.”

“Were you out there jumping on it?”

“No,” Betty says slowly.

“Did you take a hammer and screwdriver to it?”

“No.”

“Then why pay me for it? It’s not like it was your fault.”

“It could’ve been,” she hears herself saying. “I’ve been told I’m a violent sleeper.”

When his mouth quirks up in a smirk, Betty feels her cheeks heat. “Really? I didn’t think so.”

_There goes her heart again._

“I’m not taking your money, so you might as well save your energy. Besides, isn’t that what the cookies were about? Soften the blow in case I was still pissed?”

_Yes._

“Excuse you, I made those cookies out of the goodness of my own heart, from the true joy and cheer of the holiday season.”

“Huh,” he says, leaning forward as he creeps the car around the corner. She thinks she sees the hint of a smile as he does. “I swear I’d tasted a hint of bribery in there.”

“Nah,” Betty says easily. “That was probably just your own bitterness.”

When he laughs, she finds herself smiling, too.

 

 

 

“What about you?” Jughead asks. “Doing anything for Christmas?”

“My dad’s in Florida with his bitch of a new wife, my mom’s in Paris, and my sister’s somewhere following the sun and trying to make it as an influencer.”

Betty doesn’t know what it is about him that seems to have her spilling her life story but at least he doesn’t look as uncomfortable as he did the week before.

“So... you’re staying home?”

“With Caramel and a bottle of wine.”

“Is that candy or a gigolo or-”

She snorts at that. “Like I could afford a gigolo. Caramel’s my cat.”

Jughead peeks over at her phone screen she’s holding up to him before laughing. “That’s one fat cat.”

“How dare you. She’s bodacious.”

And she is. Caramel is so bodacious that she’s been put on diet cat food by the vet.

“Why not go to Florida?” Jughead asks. “I get that Paris is far, but Florida isn’t that bad. You could just ignore the wife. The beach is huge. And it’s warm there.”

“The woman is my age. I’d rather not be put in a position where I have to see her. Or see my dad _with_ her.”

“Fair enough,” Jughead says, and when he looks over at her in understanding, she feels bad all over again about the lie she’d told Archie earlier. He definitely has a good face. She can’t see very well in the dark, but she thinks he has nice eyes, too.

“By the way, what the hell is this?” he asks, gesturing to the radio. “It’s horrible.”

“It’s _festive_. Why, would you rather listen to the Scottish processionals?”

“Would you mind?”

Betty doesn’t expect him to follow through. Or for him to turn the volume up to max, either.

 

 

 

She slams her hand over the radio as they cross the bridge between the North and South side.

“What?” Jughead asks. “I thought it was a good thing to expand one’s musical tastes.”

“It was too loud.”

“I can just turn it down. You know, they say the best way to experience this kind of music is at full blast so you can really hear all the bagpipes, but if your ears are sensitive, then-”

She bats away the hand he moves towards the radio. “Just drive.”

 

 

 

When she’s back on his ugly couch with a mug of Swiss Miss that isn’t particularly great but that she has no choice but to put up with since it’s all they had at Dooligan’s, Betty frowns as he dips a cookie into his hot chocolate.

That’s not how they were made to be eaten.

“Don’t judge,” Jughead says, dunking again.

“I’m not!”

“I can _feel_ you judging.”

“Well, then you’re overly sensitive. I’m not.”

“Here - try it. It’s good.”

Betty frowns again as he slides a cookie over to her on the coffee table. She really has no choice but to try it now, otherwise it’ll just be very clear that she was in fact, judging.

“Well?”

“It’s… acceptable,” Betty says. Truthfully, it’s a little better than acceptable. “So you don’t do Christmas movies, either? Like, ever?”

Jughead shrugs. “I’ve seen _Die Hard.”_

“That’s it? What about the really great ones?”

“There are really great Christmas movies?” he asks, flipping from the documentary still paused on-screen back to the main menu. “Is it this masterpiece with the coquettish woman in a red dress and the guy in a green sweater? Or this one, with _this_ coquettish woman in this red dress, and _this_ guy in this green-”

“Not those,” Betty interrupts. “Those are crap. Good ones like, _Elf? Love Actually? It’s a Wonderful Life?”_

“Nope.”

“ _None_ of those?”

“Did the bagpipes completely destroy your hearing?”

“One, you’re very rude, and two, possibly,” Betty says, deliberately averting her eyes from his as she dunks her cookie again. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen any of those. It’s like talking to a Martian.”

“That’s such a perfect way to describe what talking to you feels like.”

She supposes she’d walked right into that one.

“Okay,” Jughead says, leaning back against the couch. “If I was going to watch just one, which one would it be?”

“Do you have a computer?”

“Over there. Why?”

Betty brushes the crumbs from her fingertips before rising to retrieve his computer from the counter top.

“I need to log in,” Jughead says, gesturing for the laptop.

“No, it’s okay - I’ve got it,” Betty says, pointer finger tapping down on the keys with deliberateness. “P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D.”

Frankly, she’s surprised when it doesn’t work.

“So close,” Jughead tsks as she hands it to him. “You forgot the ‘1’ at the end.” His fingers move quickly, but she can tell there’s at least a J, B, and a few L’s in there. “Alright, where am I going?”

“Amazon,” Betty instructs. “I own it.”

She watches as he navigates to the page before handing the computer back to her. “You are going to love this movie. And if you don’t, then honestly you should just give those Martians a call and ask them to come pick you up and take you back where you belo-”

“Wait, wait, wait - hang on,” Jughead says, and just like that, the laptop is out of her hands again. “What the hell is-”

 _“Hey!_ That is _my_ account! You have no right to go through my private-”

“Is this a Halloween costume for cats?”

_“Give me that!”_

“Did you buy your cat a Halloween costume?”

“Stop going through my-”

“Is this cat dressed as… sushi?”

“You have absolutely no respect for boundaries,” Betty says, and when he hands it back to her, she faces away from him on the couch. “Going through people’s personal accounts like you have some kind of right to. And yes, it’s sushi.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, it’s says _Hello, Betty_ and not Jughead on this tab, so it’s my-“

“The sushi, I mean.”

“Does your holiday embargo extend to Halloween, too? See, on Halloween, people dress up in costumes, and sometimes, they go around their neighborhoods and ask for candy in this wonderful little tradition known as-”

“No, I mean, why dress up the cat? A dog, maybe, but where’s the cat going?”

“Does Caramel need to go somewhere to be worthy of a costume? Just because she’s an indoor cat doesn’t mean she should be deprived of the joys of celebrating.”

She can tell he’s trying very hard not to bark out a laugh because he’s turning red. “Okay. Fair point,” Jughead says slowly. “Do you have pictures?”

How she wishes. “No.”

“Seriously? You went through all that effort and didn’t take a single picture?”

“I had to return it. It didn’t fit.”

“Because you have a fat cat.”

Since she’s made her sentiments on that line of thinking perfectly clear already, Betty sends him a calculated glare instead. “Anyhow,” she says, pulling up the movie, “here we go. _It’s A Wonderful Life_ ; I’m going to get you started on it.”

“Started?”

“The next train’s in forty minutes. After that they’re all on the hour, which means they’re really every hour and a half, and I don’t like walking around the city that late. So I’m trusting you to log out of my account when you’re done,” Betty says, holding up a finger near his nose. “I’ll know it’s you if condoms or vibrators show up at my door.”

“Why?” Jughead asks, his wide smile betraying the seriousness in his voice. “You in need?”

 

 

 

Ten minutes into the movie, Betty gives in and scoots closer to him with a sigh. In her peripheries, she sees his eyebrows raise.

“The yawn-and-stretch would’ve been far more subtle.”

She knew she should’ve just stayed put.

“That’s not what that was. I can’t see from all the way over there. This screen is fit for ants.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m saying so.”

Betty thinks about giving it right back to him when he rests his arm on the back of the couch a few minutes later, but for the life of her, she can’t come up with anything.

It’s hard to think when that ring of heat starts growing under her collar.

 

 

 

She reaches over to pause the movie exactly twenty-three minutes in.

“What do you think?”

“So far this guy wants to kill himself and the old man hit him in the ear. I’m not getting why his life is wonderful.”

“Because the movie’s not over yet,” Betty answers. “So don’t even think about turning it off until it is.”

“Are you this bossy with everyone in your life?”

“It’s reserved for the people who deserve it most,” Betty says, standing as she slides her phone from her pocket. She’s timed this perfectly - twelve minutes to walk to the station and an extra five to buffer - but she’s always about checking before she leaves the house. Sometimes, threes look like sixes to her. “But really, it’s a classic movie and you should - oh, fuck.”

Her heart plummets to her stomach immediately.

“What?”

“Nothing!”

Her train’s been cancelled.

 _All_ the trains have been cancelled until tomorrow.

“What?” Jughead asks again, standing, too. “Betty.”

She hates the sweater in her hand so much right now. All this just because of her stupid, fucking sweater.

“I, uh, guess I have time to finish the movie. The trains aren’t running.”

“Oh,” Jughead says, moving towards the window. She wishes she hadn’t said that - there’s still a good hour left of the movie and maybe, he really hadn’t been intending to finish it once she’d left. “Huh. Wasn’t snowing before. Do you have somewhere to go? You can stay here if you-”

“No, really, that’s okay,” Betty says quickly before he has the chance to finish, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she hears herself thinking momentarily that his concern is kind of sweet. “I’ll just go to Archie’s.”

“You sure?”

“He has a great couch. Super sturdy.”

“I don’t mind - I doubt even you have it in you to break this one.”

“I’m really not someone to be underestimated.”

“No, you’re definitely not,” he says, flopping back down on the ugly Monet. Her heart does that thing again. “I’m finishing this movie. You in or not?”

Betty feels her lip twist as she thinks. “In,” she answers eventually.

She needs the time to figure out how to explain to Archie that she hadn't in fact left hours before.

When she sits back down, maybe an inch or two closer to him than she had been before, Betty feels the ridges of his fingertips brush against her shoulder as he brings his arm back up to rest against the back of the couch.

 

 

 

“Why is he being such a dick to her?”

Betty frowns. “Because he likes her,” she answers shortly. She’d really rather no one talk during the movie, questions or not. “And he’s frustrated with his life.”

“That makes no sense. He’s - what?”

“What?”

“Why are you pissed? I wasn’t trying to be funny this time.”

“I’m not!”

“Yeah, you are. You’re frowning.”

“This is my face,” she defends. “This is just what it looks like.”

“Oh,” Jughead says slowly, drawing out his syllables, “you’re one of those can’t-talk-during-the-movie types, aren’t you? Got it. Won’t say another word.”

“Just watch.”

She hears him mutter something to himself before falling quiet.

_“He’s making violent love to me, Mother!”_

As her cheeks heat, Betty wishes that he’d talked over that line.

 

 

 

“You’re blushing,” Jughead says, and out of the corner of her eye, she can see his dart over to her. Betty doesn’t know why - she’s seen her handful of very mature scenes with men before, but she doesn’t need a mirror to know her cheeks are flaming red right now.

“Because I think James Stewart is cute.” _Not entirely a lie._

“It wasn’t because someone mentioned the idea of sex?”

At that, Betty frowns. She hates people thinking she’s a sexless being, because she isn’t. She has sex. She likes sex. One time, she had sex on a beach. It’s not something she’s going to do again because it’s unhygienic and uncomfortable, but she’s done it.

“I’ll have you know that’s my favorite line in the entire movie.”

“Really.”

“Mmm hmm.”

“ _That_ line is your favorite in the entire movie?”

“Yep.”

“The one about making violent love?”

“Absolutely. Someday I’d like to have someone make violent love to me. I mean-”

“Wow,” Jughead says slowly. She doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with her and her mouth sometimes. “I’m sorry you’ve been so unsatisfied in your sexual endeavors-”

“-that’s not what I-”

“-got to be really tough on you-”

“-not what I meant.”

“-I really should send you those condoms and vibrators. Couldn’t hurt, right?”

“-just shut-”

“You have my sympathies. Truly. My heart goes out to you.”

“Please refrain from talking about my sex life.”

 _“So sorry,”_ he mouths over to her, and even though she deliberately turns her nose right up at him, she finds herself wondering what the man sitting next to her is like in bed.

 

 

 

When George Bailey returns back to his normal, wonderful life, Betty whips out her phone and draws her knees up to her chest.

Next to her, she sees Jughead frown slightly from the light from her screen. “What’re you doing?”

“What?”

“Do you not want to watch this anymore?”

“I’m watching!”

“You’re looking at cats on Instagram.”

Instinctively, Betty cradles her phone to her chest. “I can watch and be on my phone at the same time.”

“This coming from the person who’d rather I not talk because I’d ruin her cinematic experience.”

“I always cry at the end,” Betty admits after a beat.

“So?”

“So I’d rather not cry in front of you.”

“It’s okay if you do” Jughead says, and it doesn’t escape her that his voice turns kind when he does. “I wouldn’t care.”

“Yes, well, _I_ would.”

But even with an array of cats distracting her on her phone, when George Bailey arrives home and kisses that damn stair post, it’s all downhill from there. Betty tries desperately not to openly wail like her heart wants to - she’d rather not give this guy any more fodder than he already has when it comes to her - but that only serves to make it worse. There’s a very unattractive sputter that escapes from her mouth when she tries to rein it in, and because she doesn’t want to draw attention to it and wipe it away on the sleeve of her sweater, a pool of snot and tears gathers in the ridge between her nose and mouth.

“Here,” Jughead says, reaching for the box of Kleenex on the bookshelf. “You’re dripping.”

She’s in the middle of blowing her nose and thinking what an odd place the bookshelf is for tissues when she feels him sympathetically pat at her shoulder.

Just once, but it’s enough to distract her in the way the cats weren’t able to.

 

 

 

Betty retreats to his bathroom after the movie in an attempt to draw down the circle of red on the ball of her nose, but after ten minutes of splashing cold water on the hopeless endeavor, she throws in the towel.

She knows herself, and it’s going to take a full hour for her nose to even think about starting to match the rest of her face again, so with a sigh, she emerges puffy-eyed and red-faced.

“You okay?” Jughead asks when she flicks off the light, and it takes her a moment to readjust to the image of him sitting there on his ugly couch again.

In that time it’d taken her to splash all that water on her face, he’d apparently changed into sweatpants.

“Fine,” Betty says quickly, even as she feels a rush of warmth run through her at the sight of those very common gray sweatpants slung low on his hips. “I should probably get going. Thanks for letting me, um, hang here.”

 _It must be a comfort thing,_ Betty thinks. The concept of comfort is extremely sexy to her - the thought of climbing into a warm bed and clean sheets during a hellish day enough is more than enough to turn her on - so that him in those sweatpants happens to be doing things to her head and heart is really just par for the course.

“Want a ride? It’s coming down pretty hard out there.”

“Oh, no - that’s okay,” Betty says quickly. “You’re already… changed and everything.”

“I know you don’t believe in sweatpants so you might find this hard to believe, but one doesn’t need to be wearing jeans to do things like walking, driving-”

“I believe _wholeheartedly_ in sweatpants. In fact-”

“-eating, sleeping-”

“I’ll just let you finish.”

Jughead shrugs, leaning back onto the couch. “Make sure Archie’s awake this time.”

“Oh,” Betty hears herself saying as she quickly fumbles for her phone - she hadn’t even thought of that. “Yeah - that’s yeah - that’s a good idea.”

But because she still hasn’t come up with excuse as to why she’s still in Riverdale, let alone hanging at the apartment of the guy she’d explicitly said she wasn’t seeing, Betty decides to keep it as vague as possible.

_You up?_

 

 

 

“So,” Betty starts as she sits back down in wait for her confirmation, drawing one leg up under her as she turns towards him, “what did you think of the movie?”

When he turns to her, eyes bright and earnest, she feels a smile break across her face. “I see why people like it. It was great.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jughead says. “So what’s your deal with it? Of all the wonderful and terrible Christmas movies out there, why this one?”

Betty shrugs, sending a glance down at her phone. Archie still hasn’t replied yet, but she finds herself thinking that she wouldn’t mind if he took his time. “I watched it every year as a kid,” she says, fingers idly plucking at a stray thread on the couch seam. “Polly would always fall asleep halfway through - she never could get past the black and white thing. And, my parents would sit on opposite sides of the room doing what they do best.”

“Which is?”

“Staring daggers at each other. Trust me, no one’s better at it than them. Honestly, it’s a wonder they stayed married as long as they did. I think they stuck it out for me - my sister’s older. But there’s something warm about this movie, you know? By the end, Polly would wake up, my parents would actually suspend their hatred for each other during those last ten minutes, and it’d just be quiet,” Betty says, feeling a sad little tug at the corner of her mouth with the memory. “We’d just watch, together. And it was nice; for that moment, we weren’t this horrible shell of a family. We were a real one. There’s great and magical power in a movie that can get my family to do that.”

He’s quiet when she looks back up at him, and she’s worried that she’s overshared again. The holidays always have her in some kind of way, a little out of sorts - she’s come to think of it as her version of Mercury in retrograde.

Not that she fully understands what that means, but she’s heard Veronica brush off some of her own strange behavior to the phenomenon before, so she figures it applies.

“Well,” Jughead says slowly, “then thank you.”

“For?”

“Showing it to me. It probably wasn’t easy to.”

“Oh,” Betty answers. Truthfully, it _had_ been - she tries her best not to think about any of that anymore, and it’s easy enough to push it far out of her mind with her family spread so far and wide. It’d been so long ago that everything that had hurt about the ugly disintegration of her family simply doesn’t anymore. It’s all now a dull ache at most.

But, there’s also something about being back in this place where it’d happened, too - something that has it all coming back clearer than it has in recent history.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” she says. “You can put a hold on that call to the Martians.”

“Will do,” Jughead says, and when he looks at her with that smirk that had her blood heating in the cold night air a week ago, she feels her stomach twist oddly. “Archie say anything yet?”

Betty sighs. “No.”

“Offer still stands. Unless you were thinking about taking another crack at the porch roof.”

“Why?” she teases. “You in?”

Jughead scoffs, pointing to his right eye. “I’m still recovering from the last time. But you go right ahead.”

“Speaking of Archie,” Betty begins, wrapping the loose thread around her finger, “why’d you come to his party that night?”

“To push your buttons. Was that not clear?

She kind of believes him.

And she also kind of doesn’t. “Why’d you come to Archie’s party?” Betty repeats.

He’s looking at her so intently that she almost feels the need to turn her eyes somewhere else. “I didn’t want to be rude,” Jughead says eventually. “Archie was nice enough to invite me, and I figured I’d used up my jackass quota for the evening with you. So I showed up.”

“Oh,” Betty says slowly. She doesn’t know why, but she thought it just might’ve had a thing or two to do with her, and that had been a nice thing to believe for a moment or two.

She doesn’t like being wrong.

“Remember that stunt you pulled on the phone?”

Jughead laughs then, in a loud and full way that has her narrowing her eyes at him. “I can’t believe you fell for that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Why would I call for your _address?_ I already suffered through asking Archie for your number, I might as well have gotten it all done in one fell swoop.”

“Yeah, well, I was a little preoccupied with the thought of an _impending lawsuit_ to think it through clearly.”

Jughead shrugs. “Fair.”

“You said that Archie said doing that would make me laugh.”

“Mmm hmm. So if you want to be pissed with anyone, direct it all his way.”

She isn’t pissed, at least not anymore. But she is curious.

“You wanted to make me laugh?” Betty asks quietly.

“Or cry.”

“Jughead.”

“You were laughing at the party,” he says quietly, eyes cast down into his lap. “Before you saw me. Seriously, the way your face changed when you did - I’ve never been talented at much before, but clearly, I am at that.”

Betty draws her own gaze down to her folded hands. She’d been shocked, sure, but she hadn’t meant to be rude about it.

“But you were laughing when you were with Archie, and I don’t know, I just thought you looked happy when you were.” He looks almost shy when he looks up to her. “It’s a nice look on you, Betty - happy.”

She’s sitting across his lap with her mouth on his before she even realizes that she is.

 

 

 

Betty only really clues into the fact that she’s really and truly kissing this guy when his hands start tracking up under her sweater and across the expanse of her back. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Betty is sure that she’s glomming on hard the fact that she never does things like this - that she’s _never_ had sex before at least three dinners and three movies in her entire life.

But right now, with his mouth hot over hers, persistent and yet, tentative, she isn’t thinking about that. What she is thinking about, as she helps him peel off her sweater, is that as nice as he’s looking in those sweatpants, it’d be a lot nicer if they were off him.

“Betty,” she hears him say, but she’s too distracted to really answer when he lays her onto her back, and when his hands start brushing across the curve of her jaw. “Betty.”

“Huh?”

“Do you want to do this?”

 _Yes,_ she hears herself thinking. _Yes._

“Betty,” Jughead says again, and it’s only then that she realizes she hadn’t actually answered him. “What do you want?”

“I want you to make violent love to me.”

And just like that, when that smirk of his twists at his mouth, she’s thrown right out of the moment.

Her and her damn mouth. And she doesn’t even have the excuse of _I’ve had a few,_ this time.

“You know, back then that probably would’ve just meant a few kisses,” he says, and slowly to control his amusement. “What did they call it in the movie? Passionate necking or something like-”

“Jughead?”

“Yeah.”

“Just shut up and fuck me.” Betty catches the edge of his smile as he ducks back down to kiss her. “But - bed!” Betty says breathlessly, a fluttering hand tapping at his shoulder. “The bed… on the bed. I refuse to be sued for this couch, too.”

He’s laughing into the curve of her neck when she hooks her legs around his waist. “Bed it is, then.”

Even though she likes sex, she’s never been all that obvious or overt about it - she’s a follow the leader type, rather than the inverse. But not tonight, apparently.

Tonight, her impatient hands work with his as they tug her jeans from her legs, and border on overzealous as they draw the hem of his shirt over his head. And even her feet, which never really do that much during sex, work their way up to the waistband of the sweatpants she likes so much, to eagerly push them down.

This guy has been nothing but a surprise to her since she’s met him, so it really shouldn’t come as one to her when she discovers that the man named Jughead Jones, who has some kind of a penchant for Swiss Miss and who doesn’t struggle with her bra like she’d expected him to, is in fact, very good in bed.

 

 

 

Later, when she’s shimmied her underwear back on, because even though Jughead has seen all of her there is to see now, she’s still not about to hang around his apartment completely naked, Betty balks when he hands her a glass of water and her phone.

“Oh,” she says slowly, taking one in either hand. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” Betty thinks he looks uncertain, almost as though he hadn’t known if offering water had been the right move. “So listen, you’re still welcome to stay here if you want to.”

There’s a text from Archie waiting, but Betty sips healthily from the glass before pulling it up.

 _Yeah,_ she reads. _What up?_

She supposes she shouldn’t have expected any more than that.

“Archie’s awake,” Betty offers, even though she isn’t even sure why.

“Oh,” Jughead says. “Okay. Want a ride?”

Betty feels her lip dart under her teeth. He’s being nice to her, and he’s back in his sweatpants and without a shirt on and lounging on his side of the bed, and she doesn’t really know what to do with all of that combined.

All she knows is that right now, she’s warm and comfortable under his blankets and she’d really rather not wrestle her way back into her pants.

“You’re, um, sure you wouldn’t mind if I stayed?”

There’s a careful smile that tugs at his mouth at her question. “No.”

“Okay,” Betty agrees, nodding to herself more so than him. “Okay.”

 

 

 

After he finds her a spare toothbrush and t-shirt, and she does as much of her skincare routine as she can with water and a washcloth, Betty climbs back into bed with him.

It’s a bit of an odd feeling, sleeping next to a man who isn’t her boyfriend; those are the only men she’s ever slept beside in her life. But, Betty thinks as he flicks off the light beside him, it’s not like she hasn’t slept next to this guy before, either.

Still, she scoots to the edge of the bed. She doesn’t want him thinking she’s getting too comfortable.

“I thought you were pretty,” Betty hears him say quietly behind her. His voice sounds loud in the darkness.

“What?”

“Archie’s party,” Jughead says, and when she rustles under the blankets, she doesn’t expect his arm to draw lazily over her hip. “I went because I didn’t want to be rude. And because I thought you were funny. And pretty.”

At that, Betty smiles. “Really?” she asks, making sure to turn the tone of her voice towards sarcasm. “I didn’t think you were either of those things.”

Behind her, she feels the low rumble of his laughter.

“Hey, do me a favor?” he asks. “Don’t leave before saying goodbye this time.”

She’s never done this before and knows only vague details about one night stands from Veronica, and one time, from Cheryl _about_ Veronica, so she doesn’t know if him saying things like that or holding her like this is really the proper protocol.

She feels like it probably isn’t.

But then again, Betty thinks as leans back into him and draws the hand he has over her hip towards her heart, it also feels kind of nice.

“Okay,” she whispers.

 

 

 

She wakes with the sun in her eyes.

It’s déjà vu like she’s never experienced before, Betty thinks as she blinks into the day. His arm is slung over her again, and her ass is firmly nestled into him. There’s no drool on his arm this time, though, which leads her to believe it must only be a thing she does when she’s had one too many.

As she carefully slides out from under the weight of his arm over her, and sits up, taking in the full view of the man she’d slept next to, Betty feels the unease set in.

She’d slept with this guy.

She had sex with him. No dates, no dinner - just plain old sex.

And now she’s here waking up in his apartment, in his bed, once again with no goddamn pants, and it’s all seeming like less of the good idea she’d thought it was the night before.

On the balls of her feet, Betty tiptoes around the room, picking up her things, before sliding back out of his bedroom again.

She really can’t be making this a habit. This very much is not her.

Fleetingly, as she dresses, Betty remembers the promise she’d made to him right before she’d drifted off - that she wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye to him this time, and she stops, jeans halfway up her legs.

She isn’t the type of person that breaks promises.

But that could’ve just been a thing he’d said to her. Maybe that’s a thing that _all_ one night stands say to each other, and Veronica had just forgotten to mention that little-very-important detail.

 _He probably hadn’t meant anything by it,_ Betty thinks as she gives his place a final once over for any traces of her still remaining. Besides, what is she really supposed to say to the guy she’d slept with the night before?

_Thanks for the great sex, how about some pancakes? Are you a blueberry or a chocolate chip kind-of-guy?_

_I prefer blueberry myself._

Betty tiptoes out his front door, this time, with her red ribbon winner tucked away safely in her tote.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote is from the perennial Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.


	3. Saturday #3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my thanks to bugggghead for literally beta'ing the minute I sent this. What a superstar of a human.

 

He’s been texting her all week.

On Sunday, it’d been a string of messages of the concerned variety.

_Hey, are you okay? I hope I didn’t do anything to upset you last night. Besides saying your cookies were dry, which I didn’t really mean._

Then- _didn’t take you for a promise breaker_ \- coupled with a winky face, the old fashioned way.

On Tuesday, he’d started with the jokes.

_So I’m listening to this Scottish bagpipe music and honestly, it’s not that bad._

_I was thinking - you should probably add a bruised nose to those snowmen if you ever make more._

By Wednesday, he’d resorted to honesty.

_I think the string of one-sided messages is already very obvious evidence of me coming on way too strong, but in case any of the above didn’t make it clear - I like you, Betty - your strange, crude taste in ugly sweaters and all._

Now, it’s Friday again and she’s at Veronica’s post-finals party with zero unread messages to her name, watching the brunette wave around two bottles of Dom in either hand.

Not that she blames him - she wouldn’t be bothered to text her silent ass anymore either.

She just doesn’t know what to say to him, at all. She’d thought about apologizing for leaving earlier in the week, but that had been right before she’d gotten her annual _‘how’s everything going Betty, any closer to marriage yet,’_ holiday phone call from her mother, which had scared her right out of that idea.

She didn’t know what kind of message that would send him, but she definitely knows she isn’t sure if she wants to marry this guy.

Then, she’d thought about texting him back on Thursday when he’d sent that very sweet message that had made her smile, right before her boss had yelled at her for something to do with kerning.

She’d blocked out the noise halfway through to keep herself from crying on the spot because she’s never done well with a workplace reprimand.

And, she’d been in a funk the rest of the day about it, so she’d gone home and had a few, both of the glasses of wine and buffalo chicken wings variety.

If she’s being honest, she’s _still_ in a bit of a funk over it.

“Betty!” Veronica calls, sashaying over to her with an unfair amount of dexterity and coordination for someone she’s pretty sure is dead drunk. “You came! This is for you.”

Betty has said she wasn’t drinking tonight, but when she’s stuck holding the bottle of very nice champagne before Veronica drops it on the floor, she reconsiders. It’d be a shame to let something this nice go to waste anyhow, she thinks, bringing the bottle to her mouth.

Although it’d really be more ladylike of her if she found a flute somewhere.

“You had sex,” Veronica says to her plainly.

“What?” she asks, coughing down her sip. “When?”

“You tell me. But I know you did. I can see it on your face.”

She’s half tempted to reach for the compact in her purse because she isn’t completely sure there isn’t some kind of scarlet A stamped on her head.

“Who’s the guy?” Veronica presses, and before she even has the chance to answer- “oh my god, it’s Archie, isn’t it? You finally slept with him. I knew you couldn’t resist his arms.”

Betty sighs as she taps on the edge of the bottle. She’s never been able to get one past Veronica. “No,” Betty says. “I don’t care for arms like his. He’s just… some guy. A friend of Archie’s. He teaches in Riverdale.”

“A sexy professor?”

“A _teacher_ , V. A high school teacher.”

“I can see that for you. Did he bend you over the desk when you asked him to spank you?”

_“Veronica.”_

“What? Is that only my fantasy?”

 _No_.

“It’s not like we had sex _at_ the school,” Betty says instead.

“So? All you need is a desk, a ruler, and a-“

 _“Okay,”_ Betty interrupts, knowing that the heat circling her cheeks has nothing to do with the very large drink in her hand.

“Are you seeing him again?”

Betty sighs and draws a long swig from the bottle. _This is really good champagne,_ she thinks, good in that it’s going straight to her head. “I slept with him.”

“And?”

“I don’t know - I’ve never done this before! How do I… talk to this guy after he’s seen me naked?”

“Well,” Veronica begins thoughtfully. “You just go up to him and ask him if he wants to see you naked again. Or, tell him that you want to see him naked again.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you like him?” Veronica asks bluntly.

Truthfully, she kind of does.

And she doesn’t really know what to do with that feeling because she thought that she’d liked nothing about him.

But she does.

She definitely likes how he is in bed, and she likes his face. She thinks she might actually even like his bizarrely strange sense of humor, too.

She’s been thinking about it this week, and it’s nice, it’s refreshing to talk to someone who keeps her on her toes, instead of someone who she actively has to try to stay awake for during discussions about stock prices and the Vineyard Vines fall collection.

She likes him, she’s slept with him, she doesn’t know how to talk to him, and somewhere on the Champs Élysées, Alice Cooper is laughing at her with a macaroon in her mouth because all those lessons she’d never listened to about keeping her knees closed are finally coming back to bite her in the ass.

“Just talk to him,” Veronica encourages kindly. “I’ve talked to lots of my one night stands - it turns out better than you think. Look, Cheryl’s right there!”

 _With two bottles of Dom herself,_ Betty notices. _And a dress that might, in fact, be a shirt._

“Really, B, how many hot professors-”

“-teachers-”

“-come your way? The only guys that ever do talk about numbers. You hate numbers. You like books.”

She’s about to burn a fucking book at this rate just to prove her point. She doesn’t know why everyone keeps glomming onto this one tiny trait about her.

She is vast and she’s made up of multitudes that have nothing to do with books.

But, if she’s being really and truly honest with herself, she also really does like books. And it’d be nice to talk to someone who uses books for reading purposes and not coaster purposes.

“You sound like Archie,” Betty says.

“How is he, by the way?”

At that, Betty smiles. “Why, you interested? I can put in a good word.”

“Oh, no,” Veronica says airily. “I just like knowing how all my past lovers are doing.”

“I’m sorry, _when_ did you sleep with Archie again?”

Betty knows that the information is stashed somewhere up in her mind, but she hasn’t eaten much today and the alcohol is moving to her head quickly.

And, Veronica’s list of sexual conquests is rather long - at least triple the size of hers. As it is, she has trouble remembering her own boring ex-boyfriends.

 _Mark, not Mike,_ she always has to remind herself. _Mark with an A, like A for apple because his face had looked like a goddamn Granny Smith._

“Years ago,” Veronica says, brushing the memory off with a swirl of her bottle. “I think it was his birthday. Or the Fourth of July - something during the summer. I know I was wearing that bikini, that one with the black stripes - the one that makes me look like I have D’s instead of C’s.”

“It was the Fourth.” She remembers very clearly now because she’d been wanting to know where Veronica had gotten that bathing suit as she’d worn one that’d just made her B’s look like B’s.

Veronica shrugs like she doesn’t care, and Betty figures that she probably doesn’t. “Archie’s cute, but he has terrible hand-eye coordination,” she says. “Did I tell you he accidentally gave me a black eye? I mean, whose hand just _slips_ like that?”

 

 

 

After she has a little more liquid courage under her belt, also known as half the bottle, Betty retreats to the bathroom.

And after a minute of miserable marveling at how Veronica’s bathroom is larger than her entire bedroom, she pulls her phone from her pocket. She considers texting the source directly and responding to one of Jughead’s many messages, but when her brain blanks and her hands start shaking, hitting letters on her phone so far from the ones she’s actually intending to type, Betty reconsiders.

 _Hey,_ Betty types out to Archie instead. _Your band still playing tomorrow?_

She’s frankly surprised when she gets a text back in under a minute. Fridays are Archie’s night to shine, and that normally comes hand-in-hand with incoherent, indecipherable messages.

_Yeah. You coming?_

_Yup_ , Betty responds. Then - _Is Jughead going?_

Betty rolls her eyes when a string of eggplants, water drops, peaches, and winky face emojis pop up from Archie.

 _Come and see,_ she reads.

She’s known Archie for long enough now to know that’s his version of a yes.

Betty pockets her phone. She’s always been better in person, anyhow.

 

 

 

On the third Saturday in a row, a fact alone enough to make her frown, she finds herself heading back towards Riverdale.

And she almost gets off at the wrong stop, too, before she remembers she’s supposed to be getting off at Greendale.

When she finds her way to the bar after two wrong turns and a pair of slush-ruined shoes, because she admittedly can’t tell east and west on her maps app - she’s a modern woman who’s been raised on left and right - she’s greeted by a decent-sized crowd at the bar. Betty smiles, even as she weaves her way toward the stage area - there are more people here than they’d have gotten anywhere in Riverdale, and that’s good exposure for Archie.

And the narcissistically named, _Archies_.

“Hey,” Betty says, dropping low to where Archie is, bent over his guitar.

“Oh shit,” Archie says, jumping up. His foot knocks against his open case. “You came.”

Instinctively, her arms cross over her chest. “I said I would, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually show.”

“I’m loving this reception I’m getting,” she says flatly.

Archie rolls his eyes. “Thanks for coming, Betty.”

“You’re welcome. I’m excited!” she says, and she finds that she actually is. “It’s a good crowd.”

“We’re on after these guys,” Archie says, grinning. “Oh, and your boyfriend isn’t here yet. He said he’s coming later. Something happened with the books. Or the essays.”

Betty figures what Archie means is something happened with _grading_ , so she goes for the more necessary takedown. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“I’m sorry,” Archie says mockingly. “Your sex friend. My bad.”

Betty lets him have that one because technically, Archie’s not wrong.

“I’m going to get a drink,” she says. “Break an arm.”

At that, Archie smiles. She doesn’t tell him to break a leg anymore because the last time she’d said that, Archie had actually broken his leg in three places and she’d felt partially responsible. So even though her head knows it’d really been the Baxter High Ravens’ problem, she still can’t say the words.

There’s juju in this world, Polly’s told her one too many times.

 

 

 

She’s two gin and tonics down and waiting for her third when she sees him.

 _He’s like a leprechaun appearing out of nowhere like that_ , she thinks as she ducks behind one of the men sitting on the barstools, peeking out from either side to get a better look at him.

A leprechaun who’s _still_ wearing an inappropriate jacket for the winter-time in that it’s not made of Gore-Tex.

But, she’ll admit, the leather looks kind of nice on him. He looks like a bit of an idiot because she’s sure he must be freezing, but still, a nice-looking idiot.

She’s in a vortex of her own thoughts, ones that revolve around how much nicer that jacket would look like off his body and on the floor of his apartment when a glass slides in her direction.

And because she’s still staring at the way his arms look in that jacket, she reaches for it a second too late and watches helplessly as the glass tumbles and shatters across the floor.

“Ma’am, you’re supposed to catch that.”

“I know,” Betty says quickly. “I’m so sorry, I’ll pay for it. I failed ball sports in P.E. - I’m very bad with my hand-eye coordination.” And in her defense, she really did, and she really is. What she _is_ good at is being at the bottom of a cheerleading pyramid with no balls of which to speak.

“I didn’t know how to dodge balls,” she continues when she’s met with a look of disbelief.

Next to her, the man she’d been hiding behind earlier snorts.

Betty frowns - she hates eavesdroppers. “Something funny about that?” she asks. “I’ll have you know that is _not_ a metaphor for my life so you can just shut up.”

The man continues his annoying chortle but because she doesn’t want to come off as completely uncouth and unladylike with him over there, Betty shoves the finger she wants to stick up at him in her pockets and makes the long trek across the bar to him.

 

 

 

“Hi,” Betty says, scooting into the sliver of empty space near him.

“Oh, good,” Jughead says shortly. “You’re alive.”

Betty sighs as he turns away from her, moving swiftly through the crowd huddled around the bar. She supposes she deserves that.

“I’m alive,” she says, scurrying to catch up and dart in front of him. “So listen, about that night-“

He pauses when she stops in front of him, looking more exasperated and done with her than he had the night she’d kicked him in the face.

She supposes she deserves that, too.

“I’m sorry I, um, didn’t answer you. The many, many times you texted me.”

“Now you’re just making me sound desperate,” Jughead says, but she can tell from his tone that he isn’t exactly pleased with her.

“And that’s probably not the right direction to go down with you right now, is it?”

“You are a perceptive one.”

“Jughead, I’m sorry I didn’t text back.”

He shrugs. “Okay.”

“It was really rude of me.”

“Okay,” he repeats.

“And I know it was really rude of me.”

“Okay.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“You said.”

“I’d very much like to see you naked again.”

She fucking _hates_ Veronica right now for planting those words in her head to begin with.

Jughead blinks at her, enough times that she feels like she can practically see her red cheeks reflected in the glass in his hand. “I honestly don’t even know what to say to that,” he responds eventually.

“The music didn’t drown that out, huh?”

“Nope.”

“And that sounded… exactly what that sounded like to you?”

“Yep.”

“So what I _really_ meant by that was-”

“Look, Betty, it’s fine,” Jughead interrupts. “You don’t have to do this. It was a nice night, and we had a nice time. We should really just leave it at that.”

“Yeah, but see, the naked comment really came out all wrong, what I was trying to-”

“I’ll see you around, okay?”

Jughead slides past her, the leather of his jacket sparking against the wool on her sweater as he does. Her _nice_ , cashmere V-neck sweater.

It’s a nice sweater, because she’s nice. That’s all she ever is.

Nice.

Through the crowd, Betty thinks she’s able to see a smaller woman with pink hair taking the second drink from him, and unlike her, she’s not wearing a nice sweater. She’s not even wearing a crude sweater - she has no sweater on.

But she does have on a very similar leather jacket to his.

Betty finds her way back to the bar, and she allows herself to drag her feet because her shoes are ruined as it is.

She hates this night now, she thinks as she reclaims her seat, even as she throws on a winning smile as Archie excitedly rushes to the stage. She wants to go home and hang out with her fat cat. She doesn’t want to be here in Greendale, or in Riverdale - she doesn’t want to be in any fucking dale. She wants to be far from here and from the evidence of her rejection.

“Another?” the bartender asks her, and she’s so lost in her own thoughts that the voice makes her jump.

“No,” Betty says. “No, just bring some shots.”

“Of?”

“Vodka. And you know what - three, while you’re at it.”

Because the service here is fucking slow and she might as well stockpile, _not_ because she’s sad Betty.

When they arrive, Betty lifts her shot glass up to Archie, and ignores the wide, deer-in-the-headlights look he shoots her from stage when she throws back the liquid, admittedly with far less ease and far more unattractive gagging than she’d once been able to pull off.

 

 

 

Betty does her best to pace herself during Archie’s set, but when the band starts a cover of _Sex on Fire_ , which she thinks might’ve been included more for her benefit than anything else, she sends shots two and three down the hatchet back-to-back.

It’s with more mournfulness than she’d expected when she realizes that very good song will not be her reality tonight, and so, she orders another three.

 _This fucking night,_ Betty thinks as she lines up the little glasses in a row, like soldiers ready for battle.

 

 

 

When Archie makes his way over to her after his set - and she knew that he would because he’d been shooting her and her shots eyes all throughout - Betty squares her shoulders and rolls her tongue around her mouth in preparation for the words she’ll have to speak.

And admittedly, it’s taking more effort than she knows that it should.

“Arch!” she says, throwing up her arms for a congratulatory hug when he worms his way over to her through the crowd. “You were great!”

Betty hangs onto him for a minute longer than she thinks is really necessary, or decent for someone who’s just her pal, but having the comfort now is a nice thing.

And so is having someone who’s objectively attractive like Archie, who had women winking at him from the crowd, giving her the time of day.

“One of these for me?” Archie asks, and before she even has the chance to object and tell him to get his own, he has her last shot in his hands and down his throat.

She sees what he’s doing here. She’s been told she can be a bit of a... _handful_ when she’s had one too many, and since she’s Archie’s invitee tonight and only a nice girl with a sensible sweater and no leather jacket, she’s going to be Archie Andrews’ handful to deal with.

And she knows how much he doesn’t like dealing with the handful that she can be.

“Of course that was for you,” Betty says, gearing up for the question that will lead her to a thousand more. “Do you know who that girl is?” she asks, tapping Archie’s arm for attention before tipping her head in Jughead’s direction. “The one with the, uh… pink hair?”

To his credit, Archie glances his over only once and relatively stealthily instead of gawking like she expects him to. “The one with your boyfriend?”

“Clearly he’s not,” she retorts plainly.

Archie shrugs. “She works at the school, too. I think she’s, like, the photography teacher or something. She has a dude’s name, but I can’t remember it.”

“Oh,” Betty says slowly.

“I don’t think he’s into her.”

With a glance over her shoulder, she considers if that could at all be true. And maybe to Archie, it could be - he could be walking down the aisle with someone and still not be into them.

But Jughead isn’t like Archie.

For starters, Archie doesn’t like books.

“It’s not like it matters,” Betty says. “I don’t like him. Come on, there’s a table over there.”

She doesn’t take the direct path to the newly-freed table, but instead the one that takes her past Jughead and the girl with the guy’s name.

Her arm is threaded through Archie’s as they push their way through the crowd, and Betty thinks it just might’ve been an effective _fuck you, too,_ had Archie’s wandering eye not wandered right back over to the brunette that had sidled into their empty spot at the bar.

 

 

 

There’s karaoke after the last band.

It’s something she normally hates because no one can really pull off Whitney Houston other than Whitney Houston, and far too many people try, and it’s always terrible.

Tonight is no exception.

Now, there’s a woman on stage singing, if she’s being very nice, a fucking awful rendition of _Born This Way_ , and all she can think as she plasters a smile on and turns to one of Archie’s band members, is that this girl was definitely not born to sing this song.

“What about you?” he asks. Betty thinks his name is Trev, but it could just as easily be Ted; it’d been too loud to hear when he’d introduced himself and now, she’s too embarrassed to ask.

“What about me?” She hasn’t really been listening.

“What do you do?”

“Oh!” Betty says. She can’t concentrate over this horrible music. “I work in publishing.”

“Publishing,” Trev-Ted repeats back. “That’s exciting.”

“Do you like books?” she asks bluntly.

“What?”

“Books,” Betty says, raising her voice this time. “Do you like them? Do like reading? Do you use them as coasters?”

“Uh,” the man across from her starts, “I guess. Yeah, sure. Reading can be fun, with the right book.”

Betty sighs.

She hates liars.

 

 

 

She’s on drink number she doesn’t give a fuck, and she’s feeling much better about everything, when that microphone up on the little raised stage starts looking like a good idea.

 _Why shouldn’t it be,_ Betty thinks.

She’s been told she has a nice voice before.

So why not sing some nice karaoke?

“I’m going to sing,” she announces as she rises from the table.

Across from her, Archie follows suit. “What? Betty, no.”

It’s involuntary, but she feels her eyes roll. “Why not? You think you’re the only… the one who can sing? I can sing,” she says, swallowing a hiccup. “Did you know Mr. Flamembauem told me I had a great voice?”

“Who?”

“Mr. Flamembauem, from… from third grade. He taught us shitty recorder.”

“Mr. _Flubert?”_

“Whatever,” she says. “He said I have a nice voice. So I’m going to sing. With my nice voice.”

“Betty, you’re slurring,” Archie tells her plainly.

“You - you just can’t hear because it’s loud in here. This is how I talk.”

She can hear Archie calling to her and telling her to sit back down as she strides her way towards the stage, but she doesn’t really care. She’s a nice girl, and nice girls can do whatever they want to.

And right now, this nice girl really feels like singing.

“I’ll go,” Betty calls out as the emcee scans the crowd for volunteers. When she stumbles slightly as she climbs onto the stage from the front, she frowns, wishing she’d used the steps on the side instead. “I can sing. I’m very good!”

“Ma’am,” the emcee says to her, covering the top of the microphone with his palm as he does. She resents that. “Are you sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure.” With a little more force than necessary, for emphasis, Betty wrestles the microphone into her grasp before turning to the attendant standing by the little karaoke screen. “Do you have _I’m Every Woman_ on that thing?”

“I’m sure we do,” the man tells her. He looks far too amused and she can’t wait to show him.

She has a _great_ voice. She’s going to show them all.

Especially the guy standing near the bar wearing a leather jacket and staring at her like she’s going to fail.

Joke’s on him, she thinks as the music starts, because she isn’t.

 _“I’m every woman!”_ Damn she sounds good. _“It’s all in me! Anything you want done, baby, I’ll do it natural_ \- you know what,” Betty breaks off as the heel of her shoe knocks into the television stand. “Can you not _move_ the screen? I’m trying to sing here.”

_So rude._

“Ma’am, I didn’t.”

“Well, it was _right here_ before,” Betty says pointing to a spot to her right. “So something moved.”

 _“You_ did.”

“Well, please don’t move it again.” Her vision is fuzzy for a moment before it clocks back onto the lyrics on the screen.

 _“Man! I feel like a wom_ \- no, wait, that’s Shania- _I’m every woman! It’s all in-_ ”

“Okay,” Archie says as he wrestles the microphone from her hand. “That was great, Betty.”

“Arch - get off, I’m _singing!_ You had your turn-”

“-drink some water-”

“-Mr. Flamembauem said I can-”

“-no one can understand you,” Archie tells her quietly, tugging the microphone from her.

“-We can sing together!”

“-let’s just get you home and-”

“-the duet from _Grease_ about sexy loving-”

“ _Summer_ loving,” Archie tells her as he rushes her off the side of the stage, hands on her shoulders navigating her towards the exit. “You can stay on the couch tonight, you can’t go back to the city like-”

“-did you want to sing that?” she asks, turning back towards the stage. “Sexy Loving? You can do Olivia Newton John, I’m aces at Travolta-”

“Nicely done,” she hears Jughead say she brushes past him. “ _I’ll_ sing the duet from _Grease_ with you if you want.”

At that, Betty stops.

This _fucking_ asshole.

Was she asking him?

“You know what?” she hears herself saying, tugging her arm from the crook of Archie’s elbow as she rounds on Jughead so quickly that her ponytail slaps her in her face. “You’re… _you’re_ not nice.”

“Excuse me?”

_“You are not nice!”_

_Hiccup_.

“And your jacket-” _hiccup_ “is also _not nice!”_

“Okay,” Jughead says slowly, eyes dark as he narrows them at her. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

It takes her a moment to register him walking away from her and out of the bar.

She knows the right thing to do is to let it go.

But, Betty thinks as her feet scurry out the door and right after him, nice girls speak their minds.

“You and your… your _friend,”_ she says loudly, gesturing back towards the bar as she steps in front of him, “you can wear your _jackets_ , and wear them, and _sleep_ in them, and wear them some more, and you can get married in them, too, if you want.” _Don’t say married_ , Betty tells herself.

 _“I’m nice!”_ she yells. “I’m a nice person, and I make nice cookies, and I sing nice songs, and I don’t sing songs with people who _aren’t also nice._ Yeah, you walk away,” she says when he turns away from her, stalking down the street with quick purpose. “You do that! You walk away because _you aren’t nice!”_

And, for emphasis, she sticks her tongue out at the back of that stupid leather jacket before blowing a raspberry at the sight of him disappearing down the block.

 

 

 

Betty blinks twice, squinting sharply as light floods her view.

It’s a patch of ceiling, she realizes when the room stops spinning and comes into focus, and that jackhammer she’s hearing, is in fact, the inside of her own head.

“What the fuck?” Betty mumbles as she pushes herself up into a sitting position.

“Morning,” Archie says flatly.

“I think I’m going to-”

She barely has time to pull her hair back from her face before upchucking into the little trash can Archie holds out at arm’s length under her face.

“Nice timing,” Betty says for lack of anything better before rolling onto her back.

“You always throw up in the mornings when you get that drunk.”

She frowns. “I do not.”

“How do you think I knew to have this here?”

It’s a good point.

And a horrible character trait about her.

“What the hell was that, Betty?” Archie asks, and she balks a little at the underlying anger in his voice.

“What was what?”

“Last night. You and Jughead - you yelled at him in front of the entire bar last night.”

At that, Betty feels her stomach flop over entirely before twisting and sinking. “I did what?”

“And that was before you followed him out onto the street to yell at him more.”

“I… yelled at him?” Betty asks quietly. She remembers him blowing her off and him saying that they’d had a nice time last week, but she definitely does not remember yelling at him. “What about?”

Archie shrugs. “Something about nice. Seriously, Betty, what the fuck was that?”

She pushes a thumb and forefinger against her temples. She thinks she might still be a little drunk. “I had sex with him.”

A pan clangs loudly on the other side of the couch, and immediately, Betty pops up from her supine position to peer over.

“Oh,” she says, feeling her cheeks heat as she watches Fred Andrews tiptoe from the kitchen. “Hi. Mr. Andrews. Nice tan!”

He’s a little lobster-looking, but she figures it’ll turn _into_ a nice tan.

“Betty,” he says, giving her a wave. “It’s like I wasn’t here.”

“You couldn’t have said something?” she asks Archie once she hears Fred Andrews start up the stairs.

“I thought you heard him!”

Betty flops back down on the couch. “What happened last night?”

“You drank. You sang.”

_“I sang?”_

What the fuck.

“That one you like about being lots of women.”

“No,” Betty moans, curling up into herself as she drags a pillow across her face. “How bad was it?”

“You’ve sounded better.”

It takes all the effort in the world, but Betty pushes herself into a sitting position again. “Archie, I’m so sorry. I just - I have no excuse for what I did. I’m so sorry. I know it was supposed to be your night, and I ruined that.”

Archie nods over at her slowly.

“I’ll make it up to you. I swear. I’m just - I’m so sorry.”

“One, you owe me Pop’s later, and that’s just the start of it. And two, you owe me an explanation, too. Jug’s a nice guy, Betty. He didn’t deserve that.”

She sighs, fingers fumbling with the fringe on the throw pillow in her lap. “I slept with him. Last week. And he’s been texting me, nice things. And I didn’t know what to do about that.”

“Why not?”

“Because he likes books!” Betty hears herself blurting out loudly. “He likes books, and he’s a little annoying sometimes, but I feel like my brain is _on_ when I talk to him, and his hat is a little weird, but kind of cute, and he’s really good in bed, and I just - I didn’t know what to do. So I didn’t do anything until last night.”

“You yelled at him because he… texted you nice things?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know,” Betty says. “He wasn’t… pleased that I didn’t respond to the nice things.”

Not that she can blame him.

“Look, Betty,” Archie starts, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “I know you glitch around the holidays because of the, um, divorce. You have for years. But you know what to do here.”

Betty sighs, tipping her head back onto the plush cushion of the couch. “I know.”

“He’s at the _Blue & Gold.” _

“The where now?”

“Your mothership. He’s the advisor - they do layout stuff there some Sundays. You didn’t know?” Archie asks as she shakes her head at him. “That’s how I met him. I was coaching and he wandered out onto the field, couldn’t find the parking lot.”

There’s a part of her that knew she’d have to step back into Riverdale High one day, but she’d hoped on that day she’d be older and wearing something fabulous, and it’d be at a reunion of some sort where they served cheap champagne in plastic flutes.

She never thought it’d be like this.

“Okay,” Betty says, pushing herself off the couch slowly. “I’m showering, then I’m going there. By the way, why am I wearing this?”

“You threw up on your own shirt,” Archie says, gesturing at his old wrestling t-shirt. “It’s in the laundry.”

“Did you… take off my puke stained shirt?”

Archie shakes his head. “No,” he says, drawing out his syllables. “No, you did that all on your own. And on the front porch, while you were singing.”

What is wrong with her?

“So the neighbors saw my bra?” she asks, voice small.

“Pretty much. You woke them all up.”

“Even little Mrs. Meherson across the street?”

“Especially her.”

Betty sighs. She really needs to stop whatever bad habit this is that has her ditching her clothes in this town. “That’s just… great.”

 

 

 

The door of the _Blue & Gold _ has never brought her as much discomfort as it’s bringing her now. In her hands, Betty idly twists at the cap on the bottle of Gatorade Archie had sent with her as she slowly shuffles her weight between her feet.

She holds her breath as she brings her fist up to knock, before pushing the door open.

“I’m looking for Jughead-” she starts, voice falling small as every set of eyes in the room turns to her. “Jones,” she finishes lamely.

It takes her a moment to scan through the room she’d once loved and been so fond of - her cognitive faculties still aren’t at one-hundred percent yet - but she sees him eventually, finger frozen over a computer screen and standing over a kid who’s clearly judging her for the fact that she isn’t on the Bulldogs wrestling team and yet, is here wearing the merch.

“Hi,” Betty says, giving a pitiful wave.

Jughead doesn’t look especially pleased to see her. And he looks even more pissed as he crosses the room quickly, pulling the door shut behind him.

“I’m working,” he says flatly.

“I know,” Betty responds, cringing at the loud echo of her voice in the hall. “I know. I’m sorry to bother you here. I just came to apologize.”

“You okay?” he asks when she takes a moment to draw in a levelling inhale.

“Please don’t be nice to me, I don’t-”

“Why would I be nice? I’m not, remember?”

“Jughead, I’m so sorry,” Betty says. “I was very, _very_ drunk, and I didn’t mean any of what I said. I don’t know how to even begin to make it up to you except to say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry I yelled at you, I’m sorry I never answered you when you said nice things to me, I’m sorry that-”

“Look, Betty - I... appreciate you coming here to apologize,” Jughead interrupts, voice tight. “But honestly, it’s probably a good thing you didn’t respond, so for that at least, you don’t owe me an apology.”

At that, her heart sinks.

“I mean, I don’t even know why I bothered after you left that morning,” he continues. “You made it pretty clear you didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and I put you in an awkward spot. Honestly, _I’m_ sorry - I should’ve just let it be.”

“No, but I liked the nice things,” Betty says, voice frantic. “I’m not expressing myself well right now. But I liked them.”

Across from her, Jughead sighs, heavily and deeply. “It’s not like it matters. The things you said yesterday - there’s at least some truth to them. You sing, probably a little better than you do when you’re not ten shots deep, you make cookies and I’m just - I’m not like that,” he says shrugging. “That’s not me, and to you, that’s probably not nice. But I’m sure there’s someone out there who is.”

“Jughead, I really didn’t mean what I said. I’m really sorry. I’m _so_ sorry.”

He sighs again. “I should get back in there,” he says, nodding back towards the _Blue & Gold. _“They’re really terrible at this whole layout thing.”

“The old stomping ground,” she hears herself mumbling.

“What?”

“I, um - I used to be the editor-in-chief. Back in the day.”

There’s something that changes in his face then, that softens the anger for a moment, before it rises back in full force. “Go figure,” he says, before tugging open the door and leaving her standing alone in the hall.

 

 

 

On Christmas Eve, she’s wandering in Macy’s when Archie calls her.

“Betty,” he greets, voice bright. “Bett- _ay_. You are amazing.”

Betty smiles to herself - she figures the game she’d gotten him for Christmas must’ve arrived, the new call of something. Call of War?

Call of Honor?

Frankly, she's been thinking of it as simply Call of she-doesn't-really-care except she knows that Archie had wanted it.

“Is it the right one?” she asks, hands lazily brushing by the racks of clothes as she strolls. She loves department store decorations and she hasn’t seen as many of them as she would have liked to this year.

“ _Exactly_ the right one,” Archie says. “Thanks, Betty.”

“Merry early Christmas, Arch.”

“You doing anything fun tonight?”

“I think I filled my fun quota for the year last weekend,” she says, jumping as a pack of men’s boxers falls from the shelf as her hand knocks it free. Cradling the phone to her ear, she swoops down quickly and shoves it back into place before quickly hurrying away from the underwear section.

She’d been idly wandering the men’s section for a supplemental gift for Archie because she’s still feeling terrible about ruining his night, but underwear isn’t the message she wants to send.

“Has he called or anything?”

Betty sighs. She doesn’t like thinking about it. “No.”

“Sorry, Betty.”

She shrugs. “It is what it is. You know, I-”

Her voice catches when she sees it - the ugliest, crudest sweater she’s ever laid eyes on.

“You still there?” Archie asks.

“Yeah,” Betty says quickly, snatching it up from the rack before anyone else has the chance to. “Still here. But can I call you back? I, uh, need to try on something. I’m out shopping.”

It’s so _fucking_ ugly, Betty thinks as she holds up the green monstrosity in front of her, turning it to the back before examining the sleeves.

And it has his name written all over it. It’s amazingly hideous, but she knows it’s the kind of hideous he’d probably laugh at.

Her heart wants to march right up to the counter, pay for it, and find some way to get it to him.

But she’s still feeling beaten and down about the last time she’d crossed paths with him at the school, and every time she lets her mind wander to that night, her cheeks inevitably burn with shame before the nagging, overwhelming need to hang her head in shame takes over.

Betty sighs, wishing she’d been able to get a better grip of herself over the past month. She knows that Archie is right, that and for reasons she doesn’t even understand, she tends to stick her nose into various wine glasses in December, more than she does at any other point of the year.

But if she has to hazard a guess as to why, it probably has something to do with the fact that it’s simply hard for her ignore the fact that her family is scattered across the globe during this time with absolutely no intention of coming back together, and that every year, she’s at the mercy of whichever friend decides to extend an invitation to her.

Still, she wishes she’d been less of a bitch to the guy who likes books, too. She wishes she’d just sucked up and swallowed her fear and told him that she just might like him, too, like her heart had wanted to, she wishes she hadn’t yelled at him, and she definitely wishes she’d bothered to stick around long enough on a Sunday to figure him out.

 _Because there’s something worthwhile there to discover_ , she thinks as she examines the sweater again.

And had she just gotten over herself, she could’ve found it out.

Still, Betty carries the sweater over to the register, folding it into itself in an effort to hide it from the other last-minute shoppers.

“Dirty Santa gift,” she explains when the checkout woman gives her a tired look as she unrolls the sweater in search of the price tag, a white lie if she’s ever told one before.

And she has. She definitely has.

 

 

 

Christmas day falls on a Tuesday, and on that Tuesday, she finds herself on the train back to Riverdale wearing her red ribbon winner.

She waits twice as long for it, it takes triple the time it normally does to get there, and the urge to get off and bolt only grows as she finds herself closer and closer to the place where she’d grown up.

But she doesn’t, and at Riverdale’s station, she adjusts the strap of her tote on her shoulder, before starting down the slush-covered path towards his apartment.

 _It takes a lot to be brave, and to put yourself out there_ , Betty thinks as she trudges - it’s heavy on the heart and turmoil on her stomach.

But, it only serves to make her feel worse about not replying to him when he’d done the same, and it’s enough to keep her going down the long, cold road.

There’s a lot of things she isn’t - someone who can hold her alcohol well, someone who’s perfect - but one thing that she is, is a person who owns up to her mistakes and tries to make things right.

 

 

 

At his door, one that she finds even more daunting than the _Blue & Gold’s_, Betty raises her fist, before knocking as far to the left as she can manage while still ringing out a noise.

She’s not about to open this with punching him in the face again.

“Jughead,” she calls, wincing at the sound of her own voice bouncing back at her. Since when has she sounded so nasally? “Jughead!”

Nothing.

 _It’s a little rude,_ Betty thinks as she continues knocking. He could at least pay her the courtesy of answering her and slamming the door in her face.

“Jughead,” she calls once more. “I know you’re still pissed at me! But I’d like to talk to you and I have nothing to do all day. So I’m going to wait right here, and if you decide to sit on that anger for even a minute, that’s where I’ll be.”

Betty lets her tote fall to the ground with an audible thunk before shucking her coat and sliding down the wall to join it, drawing her knees up to her chest in an effort to achieve some sort of comfort.

In a moment of self examination, she wonders if there’s anyone on earth spending Christmas in a more pathetic way than her - sitting outside on the floor, waiting for a man in a reindeer boob sweater.

But, she supposes as her eyes grow heavy, she’d also spent the better part of the night thinking about the order of importance of her things - her computer, the remote, and various food items - so that she could lay them out on her bed in the name of not moving the entire day.

Maybe this isn’t so bad.

 

 

 

“Betty,” she hears someone calling to her when her shoulder gently shakes. “Betty.”

As her eyes flutter open, she’s vaguely aware of the edge of a gray, pointed beanie coming into view, the door she’d nodded off staring at, and a sliver of floor, too.

“Oh! Shit!” Betty says, jumping to her feet as she comes to. “Merry...” Her hands scramble behind her back, thumb quickly flicking at the battery pack, before she throws them both in the air.

This is not the great reveal she’d intended.

“Merry Christmas!”

He doesn’t say anything to her.

But he does look at her, wide-eyed, confused, and even a little scared, kind of like she’s grown a second head and leg.

“It would’ve been more effective if you’d been behind the door for all that,” Betty mumbles.

“So I gathered,” Jughead says slowly.

“So, um… hi,” she begins, feeling her heart quicken in tempo as he turns from her, unlocking his door.

She doesn’t see the words but she does catch the corner of the Dooligan’s logo on the handful of plastic bags in his hand.

Jughead stands in the open space between his apartment and the door, leaning against the frame. She’s not being invited in, she gathers.

“Hi,” he says. It’s perfunctory and curt, and his tone makes her want to throw the sweater in his face before running down the halls and far away from him.

But she doesn’t, because she’s working on being brave. “I didn’t punch you this time. Or kick you. Points for that, right?”

His eyes narrow in confusion. “What?”

“Never mind. So I’m here.”

“You’re here.”

Betty squares her shoulders, blinking rapidly when the lights from her sweater catch her in the eyes, blurring her vision. “I’m here in an effort to express myself more eloquently than I did last Sunday,” she says. “I told you I was sorry for yelling at you at the bar, and I really meant that. I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed and mortified, and I’m just really sorry.”

Betty sucks in a breath as she braces herself to continue. “Look, and if you and the woman with the magenta hair are in a… a thing, just tell me to shut up because I’d really rather not embarrass myself any more than-”

“Hold on,” Jughead interrupts. “I’m in a thing with who?”

“The woman with the pink hair,” Betty repeats. “At the bar? She, uh, had on a leather jacket? Very petite? Has a dude’s name?”

 _“_ Wait, you mean _Toni?_ Toni who’s dating your friend Cheryl?”

She blinks over at him. “Toni’s dating Cheryl?”

“Did you not see them that night at the bar pressed up against the - my god, how drunk were you?”

“Well, I threw up on myself and stripped in front of my old neighbors so there’s - you know what, that’s not an important detail,” Betty covers when she sees his mouth tug up in a controlled smile.

“I think it’s pretty important.”

“I’m just going to be honest because all this beating around the bush is getting me nowhere,” Betty says as her arms fall to her sides. “I’m here because it’s been a very strange three weeks, and even though you drive me kind of crazy sometimes, to the point where I yelled at you in a bar, I um - I’ve had fun with you. And I like you. And I wanted to know if you felt the same.”

He crosses his arms in front of him as his eyes narrow in confusion. “So you wanted to know if I’ve had fun getting kicked in the face, which ended with the principal lecturing me about not getting into bar fights because it sets a bad example for the kids because of it, by the way. Or if I’ve had fun buying a new couch, or getting punched, or being ignored and run out on, or getting yelled at in a bar, or being told I’m not nice-”

“I actually think you’re nice,” she mumbles, feeling her cheeks heat at his very long list of consequences he’s had to deal with because of her shenanigans.

“What?”

“I think you’re nice,” Betty repeats, louder. He really has to be - anyone else would’ve slammed the door in her face by now. “And I thought your jacket was nice. I thought you looked nice in that jacket.”

He smiles a little at that, but when he remains quiet, Betty figures that it’s still her turn.

“So my defense to… all that is that a lot of that wasn’t intentional, but I see your point,” she ventures, rustling in her tote for the store-wrapped package, wishing now she’d gone with something a little more festive than paper with the Macy’s logo all over it. “This is, um, an effort to mitigate the whole lack of fun thing.”

She watches as the expression on his face changes - from surprise when he takes the package from her, to frustration when one of the pieces of tape refuses to snap and break, and finally, to what she thinks is amusement when he peels back the tissue paper to reveal the very ugly green sweater she’d wanted to give to no one else.

Complete with rows and rows of reindeer mounting other reindeer.

“And this is supposed to be funny?” Jughead asks, but she thinks it just might be to him - the corner of his mouth quirk and pull as he examines the sleeves.

“Well, yeah,” Betty says plainly. “Do you see the reindeer?”

“Oh, I see them.”

“I just thought it’d make you laugh,” she says quietly, voice honest as she remembers how he’d once wanted to do the same for her. “My sweater brought you into my orbit, or you into my orbit - kind of, along with the scary deer. I figured it’d be symbolic and I-” Betty trails off, losing her nerve as his gaze darts from the sweater to her. “I don’t really know what I meant by it. It’s a sweater with very sexually active reindeer on it.”

He holds the sweater up in front of him again in examination. “I’m not wearing this,” Jughead warns her.

“Honestly, I’d advise against it. I think you’d get arrested if you did.”

“It’s really ugly.”

“That’s kind of the point.”

“Thanks for the sweater.”

“You’re welcome,” Betty says, stepping back. It doesn’t seem like he’s even thinking about inviting her in, and she doesn’t really know what else to do about it. She’s made herself clear and she’s still a lady with principles. “I hope you have a uh, Merry Christmas.”

Even though she feels strange about it, she turns her back to him, bending slightly to scoop up her jacket and tote sitting against the wall. She hates bending in front of people - she always feels like her underwear might be on display even if she knows it isn’t, and once, her pants had horrifyingly ripped when she’d been reaching for a dropped pen.

She doesn’t put it past karma to have that happen to her again right now and so she half bends, half squats, thinking that she’s probably killed any desire she’d once drummed up in him for her with a move like that.

She’s one arm in her coat and a few paces down the hall when she hears his voice.

“Betty,” he calls.

She turns quickly, sputtering a little when her ponytail catches her in the mouth. He looks a little shy, Betty thinks as he leans over his door frame, a little amused, and a little bashful, too. Together, it’s all kind of cute.

“Did you want to come in?”

At that, Betty feels her heart thump with gusto before quickening. “Why?”

Jughead smiles, and it’s that same smile she’s seen on him a number of times before - the one he uses when he’s about make some kind of comment or retort that he knows she’ll have no way to one-up.

Then, she feels herself grinning too, because she knows _exactly_ what he’s about to say. And she knows exactly what she’s going to do in response.

“So I can make violent love to you.”

Betty laughs lowly to herself as she retraces her steps back towards his apartment, just like she thought she would, ducking under his arm to step inside.

She loves being right.

But, she thinks as he pushes the door shut, looking endearingly nervous and sure of himself all at once as he ducks down to kiss her, being wanted by someone who likes books, too, and her heinous, vulgar taste in holiday sweaters, is a far, far better feeling.

 

 

 

That Saturday, she makes her way back to Riverdale because she wants to and with no excuse or reason other than the fact that she has a date with him, one that she’s kind of excited for.

And, on the fourth Sunday, she wakes next to him once again, tucked under his arm slung over her hip and with her jeans-free legs curled around his.

She doesn’t leave this time, though, and instead of spending her morning rushing back to the city, she strolls lazily with him, a tentative hand in his, towards Pop’s for pancakes - chocolate chip for him and blueberry for her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The making violent love line is from It’s a Wonderful Life. Mentioned songs - "I'm Every Woman" by Chaka Khan and "Sex on Fire" by Kings of Leon.


	4. Saturday #53

 

 ****She’s on the midnight train, head tipped against the glass, on the way back to Riverdale.

Technically, it’s not the midnight train - it’s the one-thirty a.m. train - but she thinks midnight train sounds far more romantic.

Betty smiles to herself as her tired eyes flutter shut - she’s done this journey more than enough times this year to know that she’ll wake up when she needs to. Earlier in the year, she’d ended up in the furthest reaches of Connecticut far more times than she cares to admit, but now she has this route down pat.

It’s been a strange year - strange to come back to the town she’d grown up in and left hating again and again, strange to find and fall in love in the places and streets she’d once walked down as a child.

But, all things considered, it’s been a great, big, hell of a year, too - in the best of ways.

And, it’d also been a year that had scared her when it started.

He’d come into the city one Wednesday night for their fourth date, and because she’d been feeling ballsy, she told him to meet her at a bougie little New American place on Fifth Avenue. It wasn’t a particularly great date spot, but she had her reasons.

“Which are?” he’d asked. Over the little tealight on the table that had reflected very nicely on his hair, she’d found herself thinking that maybe skipping dinner altogether and interrupting her fat cat’s solidarity in her apartment would be a much better use of time.

But she’d held her ground. “See that table over there?” she’d said brightly, pointing over at an empty bistro table near them. “That’s the table I openly cried at when you told me you were going to sue me.”

“Really?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

He’d risen swiftly, drink in hand. “We should definitely sit at it, then,” he’d said, nodding over to her in challenge. “Come on.”

She remembers feeling like she just might tip back in her chair to join the olive pit she’d accidentally dropped on the floor and hadn’t wanted to squat to pick up.

She remembers because in that very moment, she’d realized she was very much in love with him.

On Valentine’s Day, after a meal that had showed off only the very best of her cooking skills, they’d stacked her dishwasher, and to her dismay, found her box of dishwasher tablets empty.

She’d been meaning to set a reminder for herself, but remembered then how she’d gotten distracted by Tasty cooking videos instead.

“You know, I’m pretty sure I can just use regular dish soap,” she’d said, staring down at the dishwasher door.

He’d frowned. “Doesn’t that make the whole thing explode with bubbles?”

“Urban myth.”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely tru-”

“I’m _very_ sure that’s entirely true,” she’d insisted, voice louder than his. “Archie said he tried it himself and it was fine. And I fully believe Archie’s dumb enough to try something like that.”

He’d shrugged, with something of a smirk playing on his lips. “If Archie said it, then by all means.”

After a round of Valentine’s Day sex she’d thoroughly enjoyed, they’d come back out to a sight she’d thoroughly _not_ enjoyed - bubbles leaking from her kitchen into her living room, and Caramel shrieking and sliding every which way in the vortex of mess.

“I’m going to _fucking_ _kill_ him,” she’d said, right before squealing as a jet of water splashed her in the face when she tugged the dishwasher open. “I’m never going to listen to him aga- will you stop laughing!”

But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d cupped her wet cheeks in his soap covered hands, with a smile still wide on his face. “I love you, Betty,” he’d said. “I really do. But I’m _never_ going to stop laughing at this.”

There’d been soap suds steadily pooling at her feet as her heart caught and swelled, and half of her had felt like falling face first into the bubbles - those words from him had been even better than she’d imagined.

“I love you, too,” she’d said back earnestly and quietly - the easiest words she’d ever said in her life.

Then, he’d found her phone, taken a series of photos from all angles of her ruined kitchen as she yelled at him for not being useful, and sent them straight to their idiot, lying friend.

It’d all scared her because she hadn’t felt something so big before, ever, and sometimes, it’d made her want to hide out with her fat cat.

But they’d figured it out - they made a rule about telling each other when they decided on a whim to make the trek to Riverdale or into the city after he’d ended up in Grand Central and she at Riverdale’s station one Thursday night all in the name of surprise.

She’d gotten a drawer, and then a second one in his dresser, and he’d gotten one in hers - but just one because he didn’t have a lot of stuff. He bought Caramel a little automatic feeder and tucked it away in a corner of his kitchen. She told him she was afraid of ending up like her mother, unhappy and aimlessly wandering through life. He’d whispered to her that he was afraid of becoming his father - angry and sullen, and above all, alone. She’d teased him and he’d given it to her right back. She’d cried in his arms and wiped her nose on his shirt when her grandmother unexpectedly passed away after a bad fall down the stairs. He’d held her hand at the funeral and never once let go, even as her palm grew slick in the Floridian heat. They’d had a great deal of sex, and just like that, the big love she’d felt so scared of became something she could breathe in.

 

 

 

At Riverdale’s station, she adjusts her weekender on her shoulder, and gives Caramel’s carrier a little pat when the cat mewls in protest at the movement.

Betty feels something calm wash over her when she sees him, leaning against his car with that drowsy, halfway there look on his face. There’s a coffee cup in his hand, and one sitting in wait for her on the hood, too.

She hopes it’s hot chocolate.

When she’s near enough, Betty drops her bag to the ground, places Caramel down far more gently, before tucking her leg into the space between his and kissing him soundly.

“Hi,” he murmurs when she comes up for air, lips still brushing against hers. “Missed you.”

She smiles against him. “Happy anniversary, Jug.”

 

 

 

Technically speaking, their anniversary was last Saturday - the annual Dads-of-Riverdale cruise was pushed a week this year since Fred Andrews had torn his Achilles during Jazzercize but had absolutely vetoed the idea of missing out on this year’s Bahamian fun. And even more technically speaking, their anniversary is sometime in January since they didn’t really have the _‘I’d rather not sleep with other people and my heart might be getting involved in this, what about you’_ talk until then.

But Archie’s party is later today and she has her red ribbon winner in her bag ready to go; it’s the event, they’ve decided, and not so much the date that really matters.

“How were the corporate festivities?” Jughead asks, untangling his hand from hers and replacing it with the Pop’s cup, still warm to the touch.

Betty sighs, feeling her anger resurface at her Friday night plans. “Typical bullshit.”

“The worst, huh? Sorry, Betts.”

“I just think it’s very unfair that I have to spend my Friday night socializing with these… these _people_ I already have to see and work with all day, people who I have _nothing_ in common with, and who steal my food and those little yogurts I pack for especially for my _own self_ when they think I’m not looking and- you’ve heard this before.”

Jughead smiles. “I have. But I don’t mind hearing it again - you’re sexy when you rant.”

But because she’s been practicing the art of letting things go recently, partially because Polly can’t shut up about its zen benefits, and partially because she knows she really needs to learn how to, Betty swirls the cup in her hand instead. “Coffee?” she asks.

“Mine is. Yours is hot chocolate. We can switch if you want.”

“Mmm,” she says, sipping slowly. “No, this is exactly what I wanted.”

When he starts idly running his free hand up and down her arm, she figures that he’s cold so she nods towards the car. “You hungry?” he asks as he tosses her bag into the backseat. “We can go to Pop’s if you are.”

“I’m good,” Betty says with a head shake. “I’m just tired.”

Through the swing of a pair of headlights in the distance, she catches the edge of his smile. “Home it is.”

 

 

 

A calm falls over her when he holds open his apartment door in wait for her to step across the threshold.

It’s not all that different than it was one year ago but there’s more that endears her to these innocuous pieces of furniture. His ugly floral couch is just as atrocious as it was before, but now, it’s where he’d brought her chicken soup and cough drops when she’d been as sick as a dog but had refused to move to the bed, because nothing makes her feel better like watching _Wheel of Fortune_ when she’s down with a hundred-degree fever. The TV continues to sit on top of a bedroom dresser instead of an entertainment unit, and while that still makes no sense to her, it’s also the place where she has drawerfuls of her things, including one just for sweatpants and sleep shorts, and the place where he proudly displays his _Bagpipes Rock_ CD, bearing a faded yellow sticky note with the words _‘Happy Valentines Day, baby!’_ scrawled across it. She doesn’t call him baby, and he doesn’t listen to bagpipe music, but it still makes them both laugh when they pass by it.

“Aw, Jug,” she teases, leaning down to let Caramel out of her carrier. “You cleaned for me.”

“Please,” he counters. “I put away the books on the coffee table - keep your head the size it is.”

But there’s teasing in his voice, a dust-free apartment in front of her that proves otherwise, and what she’s sure are her favorite drinks in the fridge without even having to look, and her heart swells at the thought, even if her head doesn’t.

Betty spins on her heel then and catches his mouth with hers. She can tell he doesn’t expect it, but it doesn’t take him long to clue into what she wants.

Especially when her hands start moving towards his belt buckle.

“I thought you were tired,” he comments lightly.

“Not enough that I can’t do this. Are you?”

“Hey, I had coffee. I’m good to go.”

Betty smiles briefly before drawing her focus back to her feet, shuffling backwards towards the bedroom. Caramel objects when she pushes the door shut behind them, but Betty figures she’s earned the privacy.

Her cat is something of a pervert, and has been known to interrupt at the most inopportune of times.

 

 

 

Later, when her legs are tucked against his, clad in yoga pants because it’s cold out tonight, her heavy eyes fly back open at his voice in her ear.

“I forgot to tell you - I heard back from that interview,” Jughead says quietly, fingers idly running through her ponytail-free hair. “They want me to come back in next Wednesday.”

At that, she flips over to face him, forehead nearly knocking into his in excitement. “Yeah? The school in Brooklyn?”

“The one in Queens.”

“Didn’t you not like this one as much?”

In the sliver of night that floods through the crack in his curtains, Betty sees him shrug one shoulder. “No, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try. You never know.”

“Jug,” she sighs, drawing one leg over his under the blankets, “I don’t want you to move until you find something you like as much as this.”

“I know. I won’t,” he promises her, gently tracing a finger up and down the length of her arm. “You know I won’t. It’d be nice though, living in the same place and not having to do the train thing to see you.”

While they’ve talked about the big if of Jughead moving to the city, the question of where he’d live once he got there has been decidedly less of a conversation topic. But on this day, and with the night’s help covering her bashfulness, it feels like an easier subject to broach.

“Same place as in same city, or same place as in both names on the little tag next to the buzzer?”

He plays it off nonchalantly, but because she knows him now, she sees the undertone of his own shyness there, too. “I meant the subway, too, when I said the train thing.”

“Yeah?” she asks through a wide smile she neither can nor wants to hold back.

“If you’re ready to get out your label maker and try to fit both our names on the tag, then yeah.”

“Your couch isn’t invited, though,” she teases.

“Then your coffee table isn’t either.”

“What? Why not? It’s a West Elm.”

“It’s too low. I bump into it every time I get up - my shins can only take so much.”

“If you didn’t thrash around every time you got up, your shins would be just fine.”

“I have never _thrashed_ in my entire life.”

“Just last week, you leapt over the coffee table. Remember? You knocked those coasters into a smiley face.”

That she’d ended up taking a photo of, because she loves little coincidences like that.

“I was trying to get snacks before the commercials ended,” he explains, a little pointedly. “Still - a person needs room to thrash a little in his own home, Betts.”

“Fine,” she sighs dramatically. Truthfully, she’d been willing to give it to him at the outset, but some light ribbing here and there keeps things fun. “We can table this for later.”

His mouth twists in a playful smile. “You mean we’ll _coffee table_ it for later.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.” But when she flips back over, she makes sure to draw his hand over her heart, so that he knows she appreciates the effort he puts into trying to make her laugh.

“Anything you want to do today?” he asks, words falling warmly against her neck.

Betty shrugs against him. “Not really. Just this, I guess.”

She exhales deeply when she feels him hum in agreement behind her; it’s these little moments, she’s come to find - the ones where she feels his chest rise and fall in time with hers, where she hears the dull thrum of his heart playing in her ear - that make her sure she’s ready to get out the label maker and put his name next to hers on the little buzzer tag.

“I’m proud of you, Jug,” she tells him, squeezing his hand for emphasis. “I should’ve led with that.”

But when she feels him smile against her bare shoulder, she realizes that he’d already known.

 

 

 

Betty wakes when she slings her arm over to the left side of the bed and hears nothing in response. Somewhere deep in her subconscious, she knows that she should’ve been greeted with a grunt if he were there since she’d flung her arm very widely, and it’s enough to draw her eyes open.

She sits up slowly, rolling out her neck from side-to-side. The door’s ajar, breezing in a low hum from the TV. _It’s the news_ , she realizes as she gathers up the blankets around her shoulders, which means that he must be grading.

After reading more or less the same boring words wax poetic about the lord and savior that is Holden Caulfield, he needs something to keep him awake, he’d explained to her sometime in May when he’d been in the thick of grading final papers and one bad essay away from tossing them all out the window.

“The gremlin lives,” Jughead greets as she shuffles into the living room, gathering up the stack of papers next to him on the couch and tossing them to the coffee table to make room for her.

“You could’ve done those in bed,” she comments.

“The last time I did, you said - and I quote verbatim - my flipping was like gunfire into an bullhorn.”

“Huh.” Betty scoots closer to better scan over the words. It’s looking like a solid B to her. “I’m dramatic, aren’t I? Also, there’s a missing _‘the’_ there,” she says, tapping at the essay.

He drops a kiss to her forehead, one that’s completely casual and practiced, and that still has her heart doing a little lurch regardless. “At least you’re a self aware dramatic.”

She supposes she’d handed him that one on a silver platter.

“What food is there?”

“I bought Pop Tarts,” he tells her, face brightening as he does.

“Strawberry ones?”

“Why would I get anything else?”

“Oh I don’t know,” Betty begins far too sweetly, a teasing smile building at her lips, “sometimes the word strawberry looks like the word raspberry, doesn’t it?”

He rolls his eyes. “That happened once. And before you get into this again, no, not because those two words look alike; because some dimwit at the Pop Tart company decided to use the same pink on both boxes and I wasn’t looking.”

“Whatever you say.” Then - “thanks for the Pop Tarts.”

His acknowledgement is a small but still proud smile. “Want me to get you one?”

She considers it before replacing the papers on his lap with her head. “In a minute,” Betty tells him, voice laced with sleep.

“Still tired?”

“Just resting my eyes.”

She dozes off feeling the dull weight of his handwriting against her back as she does - a comma and an A- here, a semicolon and a B there.

 

 

 

When she wakes for the second time, she’s feeling like cookies instead, so she forces herself into jeans and into his car. Regardless, she brings a sleeve of Pop Tarts in tow because she still lives and breathes by the principle that a girl needs her healthy breakfast to start her day.

“What?” Betty asks when she sees his eyes flick her way as she’s midway through a bite.

“Nothing,” he says quickly.

“This is about crumbs, isn’t it?”

“No. Yes,” Jughead admits when she raises a careful eyebrow over at him.

“You’re so weird about your car.”

“How is not wanting crumbs in my car weird? There are ants in this world.”

“Because,” Betty starts pointedly, “you eat food without plates all the time at home. How’s a car any different? There are ants there, too.”

“ _All the time?_ I’ve never heard a more gross exaggeration in my-”

“Peanut butter fell _on my nose_ while I was napping not two weeks ago because you didn’t use a plate. I almost inhaled it,” Betty argues, smiling widely when he fails to come up with a response. “Besides, there’s not a crumb in sight - I’m a very neat eater. And don’t make that dirty,” she instructs quickly, because she knows that smile, and she knows he’s about to.

They’re halfway to Stop and Shop when his hand wraps around her wrist and gently tugs over the half a Pop Tart she’s holding onto, bringing it to his mouth.

Frankly, she’s surprised it’s taken him this long.

 

 

 

“Betty, really,” he says after her hand lingers over, then pulls back from the milk for the fifth or sixth time, “it’s just milk - it’s all the same.”

“If they were all the same, I wouldn’t be having this hard of a time choosing,” Betty comments. “Do you think it means anything that this cow looks a little happier than that cow?”

He gives her a look that tells her what he thinks it means is that he’s dating a crazy person.

“It means you should go with the happier cow,” he says eventually.

“Really?”

“Why would you go with the sadder-looking cow?”

Betty shrugs. “I don’t know. What if the happier cow’s just putting it on to drum up sales? What kind of moronic cow is that happy on a dairy farm?”

“The kind that’s animated and drawn by the Horizon PR people,” Jughead says. “So, this one? Or-”

Betty cuts him off as she’s knocked and bumped unceremoniously; with shoes squeaking loudly against the tile, she stumbles against him.

“I’m so sorry,” she hears someone tell her as she gathers herself back together and upright. “I didn’t - oh, hi Mr. Jones.”

Over the past year, she’s spent a fair amount of time in Riverdale, but even so, they’ve only run into his students a handful of times. It’s not like there’s much overlap in the venn diagram that’s them and the freshmen at Riverdale High besides Pop’s, but still, it’s a small town, and it surprises her it hasn’t happened more often.

“Ambrose,” Jughead greets, but not before he gives her the once over to check for broken bones or stubbed toes, because he’s dramatic like that.

And sweet.

“Hi,” the kid named Ambrose says again. “Sorry for running into you,” he tells her. Then to Jughead - “I was just getting snacks. I’m going home to write my paper right now.”

Jughead shrugs. “Hey, it’s your weekend. You do what you want with it. Enjoy your… Margarita mix,” he finishes, voice turning flat as his eyes draw down to the plastic bottle.

“Oh,” the kid says, quickly turning away the smiling, buxom lady on the bottle. _Idiot youths_ , she thinks. _She was way more subtle at that age._ “This isn’t what it looks like. I just, uh, enjoy the flavor of this stuff. You know, on its own.”

“You enjoy the flavor of high fructose corn syrup and lime on its own,” Jughead deadpans back.

There’s a feeble kind of _‘yeah’_ in response before the kid flutters away, one that Betty thinks he could’ve stood by a little more because, in her experience, most kids do enjoy the flavor of high fructose corn syrup anything.

“Mr. Jones, huh?” she asks when she’s sure they’re alone.

Jughead rolls his eyes. “Unlike you, not everyone has the privilege of calling me _‘Hey, Jug’_ when they want something - hey, Jug, can you get me water please, but with ice and a lime, hey, Jug, leave me alone, I’m napping, hey, Jug, if you really love me, could you pick up a pizza on the way over even though there’s torrential downpour out-”

“You talk entirely too much, Mr. Jones,” she interrupts, leaning forward and dropping the name nearer to his ear, a little silkily, but more teasingly than anything else.

“I know you’re trying to make it weird, but it’s not going to work.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jones,” Betty continues with as much faux-innocence as she can muster as she reaches for the bag of flour in their basket. “Won’t happen again, Mr. Jones. Say, Mr. Jones, do you own measuring cups?”

He’s unaffected as he looks back at her. “I think I have an eighth-cup somewhere.”

“Oh, drat,” she says, sighing dramatically. “Do you know how many of those we’ll need to make two cups, Mr. Jones? I’m sure I don’t know! See, Mr. Jones, I’m not terribly good at math, and it says here that-”

Betty lets out an involuntary squeal when he spins her towards him without warning, before silencing the rest of her sentence with a firm kiss. She’s never been a public displays of affection kind of person - holding hands is more than enough for her - but she lets herself feel this one for a moment, even if she is growing chilly standing in front of the milk and eggs.

“Sixteen,” he says when she comes up for air, and it takes her a moment to remember what he’s referring to.

 

 

 

He puts on _It’s a Wonderful Life_ in the background as they decorate the cookies, in likenesses of each other because she insists that’s the most fun. And because she hasn’t gotten the chance to do this with someone since before she moved from Riverdale.

 _“Hey!”_ Betty says loudly when she feels him peering over her shoulder. “Don’t cheat!”

“Who’s cheating?”

_“You are!”_

“It's not a game!”

“You’d be losing if it were!” Betty says, holding a hand over her misshapen gingerbread man - he doesn’t have cookie cutters and they had to improvise. “It’s supposed to be a surprise. Anyhow, I’m done,” she singsongs, holding out her hands in presentation of her handiwork. “Good, huh?”

She doesn’t need him to confirm that it is. His beanie may be bright blue instead of gray, but this is Van Gogh level artistry.

“Not bad,” Jughead says, nodding in approval. “But, nowhere as good as mine.”

 _Highly doubtful,_ she thinks as she turns to his side of the counter. She’s been decorating cookies for years, and he’d never even sniffed in the direction of a Christmas cookie before last year. There’s no way his are in any way-

_“What the hell?”_

“What?” he asks. He’s barely holding back a laugh at her expense, she can tell.

“Why do I look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Completely hideous!”

“Hey, I resent that! This is a very realistic, painstakingly crafted rendering of you. See, you’re frowning because you have this horrible crick in your neck.”

“Do I, now?”

“Yep. It’s from your ponytail,” he says pointing to the messy mass of yellow royal icing shooting out in all directions from the gingerbread man’s head. “It’s so heavy that it’s pulling your head right back.”

“And I’m crying multicolored tears because?”

“Neck strain. And back spasms from the neck strain. Don’t look at me like that; it’s a very debilitating, serious condition.”

“Yeah, well, you know what?” Betty starts, gathering up her meticulously decorated cookie and turning it icing-side down onto his. “That’s what I think of that debilitating, serious condition.”

Jughead looks between her and the two ruined cookies. “Kinky,” he comments lightly. “Are they making violent love? I hear it can help with back spasms.”

She doesn’t want to give in quite yet, but between all that Mr. Jones teasing, which she’ll admit only to herself turned her on more than it should’ve in front of the wall of butter, and slamming the two cookie-versions of themselves together, she’s now very much in the mood.

 _It’s this damn day,_ Betty reasons as she tugs him forward, both hands firmly grasping onto either side of his flannel as she kisses him.

It isn’t the first time they’ve had sex on his kitchen floor, or hers for that matter, but it is the first time she’s been prompted by sugar cookies. And when he murmurs something about how beautiful he thinks she really is with a look so intent that she almost feels the need to look away, all thoughts of the ugly-Betty cookie flit right out of her head.

Not that she’d really been offended to begin with.

 

 

 

Later that evening, he tells her again that he’s perfectly willing to take her somewhere nicer for dinner - somewhere with tablecloths and bougie eucalyptus scented tealights in the offerings - but Betty insists on Pop’s.

“We met there,” she tells him, fondness in her voice.

“Technically, we met on the side of the road while you were wearing that monstrosity,” he says, gesturing to her sweater with the hand that isn’t holding onto hers.

Betty shrugs. “Semantics.”

At the diner, she’s greeted by Pop, holding his arms out wide to her as he tells her its been far too long since he’s seen her.

It’s been a week, maybe two, but she’s inclined to agree. To her, that’s a long time to go without a good milkshake and a warm smile from Pop.

She sits on the same side of the booth as him tonight because it gives her better access to his plate, which she always likes siphoning from.

And, it gives her better access to his hand, too, which she kind of can’t stop holding tonight. She isn’t usually the sentimental type, but tonight it seems, all bets are off.

When there’s a handful of fries left on their plates and a sip or two of milkshake left in their glasses, she sits back against the bench with a contented sigh.

“Happy?” he asks.

Betty hums out her response, but she feels like his question is also deserving of a real answer. “I am,” she says. “In all seriousness - thank you, Jug.”

“For?”

Betty shrugs. “For this - you, us. I know I can be difficult sometimes, but you love me just the same, and I’m grateful for that.”

“Betty,” he begins, bringing his hand up to her jaw and brushing a thumb over her cheekbone, “bringing you pizza and water with ice is easy; putting up with the way I can be moody isn’t,” he says, and when she sees him reach into his pocket she nearly screams at him to stop. It’s not that she’d say no, and it’s not even that she’s unsure - because she’d say yes, and she is. But she still wants some time with him, time where they aren’t careening towards some kind of aisle in a white dress and a tux to just be them. “So, thank _you_ ,” Jughead continues softly as he places an incredibly poorly wrapped package out on the table. “I love the way you love me.”

She’s pretty sure that’s not what she thinks it is, but she can’t help but check.

“That’s not - you know-”

“Give me a little credit,” Jughead says. “I wouldn’t wrap _that_ in newspaper and just hand it to you. When that happens, expect a full bagpipe processional playing that song you sung during drunk karaoke. Expect some doves, too, flying right into skywriting above your head. There might be a blimp, but I haven’t decided on that part yet.”

“Oh, there’d better be a blimp,” she says, unable to mask her laugh because it’s all so not her and it feels nice that he knows that. And nicer still that in his mind, too, it’s _‘when,’_ and not _‘if’_.

“Noted. Relax,” he tells her. “It’s just an anniversary gift.”

“Jug, I told you not to get me anything.” _She_ didn’t get him anything because she’d listened to their rules.

“Just open it.”

Because she’s never been one to not pounce on a present, Betty reaches for the gift and eagerly pulls off the newspaper, hanging on to whatever’s underneath by imagination even though there’s what she thinks is an entire roll of tape on it.

“Batteries?”

“For Dasher and Dancer.”

“How very considerate of you.”

“I thought so. I have triple-A’s, too. Can’t take any chances.”

“Your dedication to lighting up my boobs is inspiring.”

“Hey, you’re the one who bought it,” he says shrugging. “I’m just supporting you in your festive endeavors like any good boyfriend should.”

“Can you?” she asks, turning her back to him and gesturing down to the battery pack she’d tucked into her jeans earlier.

She yelps when his hands brush over her spine. “Sorry, cold fingers,” Jughead says before clicking the little box shut again. “You’re good to go.”

Betty flicks her thumb over the switch and watches as the twin red noses light up, with his face right alongside it.

He may have given her shit for this sweater out on the roadside, and he may continue to tease her about it until they’re old and gray, but she knows the magic of this thing - it’s too crudely endearing to not smile at.

“Shall we?” he asks, tipping his head towards the door.

She takes his hand and squeezes once. “Let’s party.”

 

 

 

Archie’s already drunk with his shirt off and tied around his head when they get there.

“Friends!” he slurs, arms held out wide and a drink in each hand. “Welcome!”

“Arch,” she greets, holding back a cringe from Archie’s sweaty embrace. “Are those for us?”

“What? No. Get your own - these are mine,” Archie says before half-sauntering, half-stumbling off onto the porch. There’s no one out there since it’s deathly cold tonight, but she’ll let him figure that one out for himself - karma for being greedy and all that.

She finds them clean cups eventually and pours far less gin and far more tonic into them than she had last year, before making the obligatory rounds.

Toni’s there, clutching onto a bottle of Dom and looking at it with pure confusion, and Cheryl’s there, too, looking at hers with the same loving look Betty’s seen her throw Toni.

“I would’ve brought you one, too, cousin,” Cheryl tells her, shooting a glance down to her solo cup, “but frankly, I wasn’t sure you’d know how to appreciate it.”

With two drinks in her hand and Cheryl eventually out of her way, Betty finds him loitering near a half-open window looking a little flushed and red in the face. “Planning your escape?” she asks, dangling a cup in front of him.

“Hardly. I need air - it’s a million degrees in here.”

“Hyperbole, and from the English teacher no less. For shame.”

“Hyperbole to you, truth to me.”

“Potato, potato.”

“This isn’t bad, by the way,” Jughead says, shaking the cup between his fingers slightly.

“Of course it isn’t - I made it.”

“You say that like you haven’t made a bad drink from time to time.”

“I’m a master mixologist.” But because she can’t help herself- “When?”

“At this very party, last year - you made yourself drinks that sent you scaling up a roof and that ended with my black eye. All gin and no tonic if memory serves.”

Betty shrugs, unbothered. “Again, potato, potato.”

Jughead laughs then, skimming his hand across her lower back to draw her close. “I want to show you something,” he whispers into her ear, one that comes out as more of a shout over the music. “Upstairs.”

Her nose scrunches involuntarily as she pulls a face. “Does it involve your pants coming off?”

“No, but way to knock a man down a peg on his anniversary.”

“Have your pants not come off enough times today to keep that peg firmly in place?”

“What is _enough_ , really?” Jughead begins. “In the same way that happiness is just a construct, the idea of enough can be said to similarly encompass such notions, too. I mean, if you really think about it, it’s _society_ , and not the _individual_ that-”

“Okay,” Betty interrupts, giving his shoulder a light slap with the back of her hand. “Upstairs it is.”

 

 

 

The door to the guest room is locked so they opt for Archie’s room instead.

It’s still the same as she remembers it, complete with the photo of her passed out on Archie’s bathroom floor in senior year, and him sitting next to her, grinning maniacally while flashing two thumbs up.

“I really have to get a copy of this,” Jughead says, looking at the picture fondly.

“You forget that I have all those pictures of you asleep in the bathtub after your last day of school bender,” she says breezily.

“We can frame them and display them side by side.”

“Or put them on the fridge.”

“God, I love your mind,” he tells her and even though he’s joking, she can tell he really means it, too. “Close your eyes.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you trust me.”

Betty thinks about making some kind of dick joke then, but she has the sneaking suspicion that whatever he’s up to will be something sweet and she doesn’t want to taint the moment with her crudeness.

She lets her eyes fall shut.

There’s a soft kind of rustling, the sharp sound of a static spark or two, and a distinct lack of any unzipping before - “How do I look?”

Her eyes fly open, and in the annoyingly dim lighting of Archie’s room, what he calls mood lighting, it takes her eyes a while to adjust. But when they do, she barks out a loud and truly unladylike laugh at the rows and rows of very enthusiastic and sexually active reindeer on his sweater.

“What happened to _‘I’m not wearing this’?_ ” Betty wheezes out.

“The heart in love does crazy, stupid things, apparently. You’re posting my bail if I get arrested tonight.”

“I have thirteen dollars on me, so you’re on your own,” she says, stepping close to him and reaching for his hand. “You’ve been wearing two sweaters this whole time?”

“Mmm hmm,” Jughead says, drawing up his sleeve over his brow. “I’m so hot right now, you have no idea.”

But in a way, she very much does, she thinks as she rises on her toes to kiss him. The sweater is just as heinous as it was last year; maybe even more so.

But it also doesn’t preclude the fact that he looks kind of good in it.

Sexy, even.

With his fingers laced between hers, and her lips pressed to his, smiling in anticipation of what’s to come, she guides his hand behind her back to the battery pack tucked into the waistband of her jeans and runs his thumb over the switch to the right-most setting.

She’d been looking for the right time to show him this, and she knows that it’s now.

_Rudolph, the red-nose reindeer! Had a very shiny nose!_

There’s confusion on his face when he draws back, but it’s only there for a moment before a wide smile grows across his face.

“You’re kidding,” he says through an incredulous laugh.

“Oh, did I not tell you?” Betty says innocently, brushing her words over his lips. “It sings, too.”

 

 

 

_**Fin.** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To bugggghead who faithfully beta’ed this entire fic during the holiday season and beyond - thank you from the bottom of my heart! If I had a red ribbon to give, it'd go to you.
> 
> To you, the festive and wonderful readers - thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm for this story. I truly didn’t expect it, and I’m so grateful for the love. I had so much fun writing this version of these characters and dipping my toes into a slightly different tone than I’m used to. I hope that this tale of a very crude, singing ugly sweater brought some joy to your holiday season (and beyond because I in no way finished this on time).
> 
> As always, would love to know what you thought of this final chapter! I hope you loved it!
> 
> Until December then, folks! When I’ll tell myself I’m not writing a holiday fic and end up writing one anyway. I hope you all have wonderful, safe, and healthy 2019’s until that inevitable, jolly time.
> 
> Tumblr - @heavy-lies-the-crown


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